My partner and I found a great deal on an apartment in NYC last year and signed a lease, starting April 15, 2021. At the time we were looking exclusively for rent stabilized units and we were told that this was one. We made certain that the lease explicitly stated that the apartment was rent stabilized, it was included in a bullet point on the rider, signed by us and the landlord.
We know that we are supposed to receive a lease renewal 150-90 days before the end of our lease. We did not receive one, so we reached out to the landlord requesting that they send us the lease renewal. We did not hear back from the landlord, but the broker for the apartment knocked on our door today. He told us that it was a mistake made by his assistant and that neither the building or our apartment is rent stabilized. We would not have taken this apartment if we had known it was not rent stabilized.
The broker said the LL will offer us a new lease for one year at the rate that we currently pay, but that after one year they could charge us whatever they want. We do not want to have to move now or in a year. As we have a lease that explicitly states that this is a rent stabilized unit, what are the next steps that we should take? What resources are there that we can use? Shouldn't the terms of rent stabilization apply to our apartment since that is part of the terms both parties agreed to?
EDIT: We've spoken to a couple tenant lawyers (free consultations) and they're saying similar things. It sounds like, although DHCR is saying that our current unit is not stabilized, it could have been illegally deregulated. We're requesting the rent history to find out. As far as legal avenues go, apparently we'd have to sue for something along the lines of illegal marketing or promissory estoppel/detrimental reliance. For that to hold any weight we'd have to prove that we wouldn't have taken this apartment if we didn't think it was stabilized (which is easy) and that we would've lived here longer than what they're offering (which is apparently very difficult). It seems to us that, whether purposeful or negligent, there isn't a lot we can do in terms of legal recourse. What they did was definitely illegal, but as it would be inordinately hard to prove damages, it seems that winning a lawsuit is unlikely. It really sucks because we genuinely had talked about living here for 10 years and that there is no way we were going to be able to afford a place in Manhattan again. The pandemic was our one shot to live where we really wanted and we were cheated out of it because of a lying/negligent broker and landlord.