The 421A tax abatement program is a source of much controversy in New York with various efforts to repeal or replace the program altogether, including the upcoming legislative session. This analysis investigates buildings using the program in New York State Assembly District 36 (and to be expanded to other districts) with an aim to:
For this analysis, we will only be looking at properties in Tax Class 2. This contains all residential buildings with more than 3 units and helps narrow down the search for landlords with questionable tax declarations. Here is more info on the tax classes: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/finance/taxes/definitions-of-property-assessment-terms.page
What is 421A?
The 421a tax abatement program was first created in 1971 to try to spur affordable multi-unit development in the city. When in the program, the major benefits come from significant property tax breaks you receive post construction. There are four different abatement term lengths – 10, 15, 20 and 25 years – each starting with a 100% abatement on your property’s taxable value with the abatement slowly decreasing over the length of your term.
What is the goal of this analysis?
Find Illegal Rent Increases in Rent Stabilized Units
As part of the 421a program building owners must make some (all?) apartments rent-stabilized. Rent-stabilized apartments are reported on property tax bills and charged a rate (now $20) per unit. Landlords in NYC have historically used many methods to skirt rent-stabilization laws.
Other means include providing rent benefits (i.e. first month free) and then increasing the rent next year to the “legal rent”. We want to find these issues and by going through 421a buildings and their reported units, we may find instances of such behavior.
It’s a little difficult to get rental history for an apartment and perform this analysis as only current tenants are allowed to FOIA New York State to provide this information. As such, the only way to analyzing these issues would be through high info tenants or activists finding and working with tenants to FOIA the information themselves. Using the information we get from pulling 421a property tax information and finding irregularities may point us towards building owners not fully cooperating with the regulations behind the 421a program.
Lost Tax Revenue
The 421a program provides some eye-catching tax abatements for all sorts of buildings – from small multi-unit walkups to newly developed luxury apartment complexes. I want to use this analysis to show the significant lost tax revenue from buildings that may not be providing rent-stabilized or affordable units.
Data and Sources
All the building and tax information below comes from two sources provided by NYC Department of Finance.
All code is published here: https://github.com/rohuniyer/housing_421a
- Highlight irregularities in reported rent-stabilized units that may indicate tenants being overcharged
- Highlight lost tax revenue for New York City stemming from large rental buildings using this program
For this analysis, we will only be looking at properties in Tax Class 2. This contains all residential buildings with more than 3 units and helps narrow down the search for landlords with questionable tax declarations. Here is more info on the tax classes: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/finance/taxes/definitions-of-property-assessment-terms.page
What is 421A?
The 421a tax abatement program was first created in 1971 to try to spur affordable multi-unit development in the city. When in the program, the major benefits come from significant property tax breaks you receive post construction. There are four different abatement term lengths – 10, 15, 20 and 25 years – each starting with a 100% abatement on your property’s taxable value with the abatement slowly decreasing over the length of your term.
What is the goal of this analysis?
Find Illegal Rent Increases in Rent Stabilized Units
As part of the 421a program building owners must make some (all?) apartments rent-stabilized. Rent-stabilized apartments are reported on property tax bills and charged a rate (now $20) per unit. Landlords in NYC have historically used many methods to skirt rent-stabilization laws.
Other means include providing rent benefits (i.e. first month free) and then increasing the rent next year to the “legal rent”. We want to find these issues and by going through 421a buildings and their reported units, we may find instances of such behavior.
It’s a little difficult to get rental history for an apartment and perform this analysis as only current tenants are allowed to FOIA New York State to provide this information. As such, the only way to analyzing these issues would be through high info tenants or activists finding and working with tenants to FOIA the information themselves. Using the information we get from pulling 421a property tax information and finding irregularities may point us towards building owners not fully cooperating with the regulations behind the 421a program.
Lost Tax Revenue
The 421a program provides some eye-catching tax abatements for all sorts of buildings – from small multi-unit walkups to newly developed luxury apartment complexes. I want to use this analysis to show the significant lost tax revenue from buildings that may not be providing rent-stabilized or affordable units.
Data and Sources
All the building and tax information below comes from two sources provided by NYC Department of Finance.
- Property Address Search
- This is an incredible resource with years worth of property tax data but everything is in a PDF format. Any information below on rent stabilized units comes from here.
- Use the above link if you want to do any more research on individual properties listed below.
- Every year the PDF changes slightly so my code has to be tweaked accordingly. As I work through historic data, they will be added here.
- NYC Open Data Property Valuation and Assessment Data
- This is another fantastic resource with very detailed (and easy to read!) information on property valuations and any abatements received.
- This will be used for further analysis into lost tax revenue.
All code is published here: https://github.com/rohuniyer/housing_421a
Rent Stabilized Units By Year
The following two tables contain all buildings under Tax Class 2 in Assembly District 36 currently using the 421A tax abatement program. Every year, the owner is supposed to report rent stabilized units in the building and meet specifications under the 421A program. Using the property tax documents, the tables below show the number of reported rent stabilized units in the past three years. Years without any units reported are highlighted red.
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421A Units in AD36
This map is a work in progress.
Right now, this map shows all buildings using the 421A program in 2021. The size of the bubble indicates the number of rent-stabilized units reported. The color of the bubble indicates if there are any irregularities in their reported units - red means we should look deeper into this building's practices.
Finally, clicking on each bubble will display information on the rent-stabilized units in the past three years (same as above tables) and will also include information on the property's assessed taxable value, the exempted value from 421A, and the total actual taxes paid.
Right now, this map shows all buildings using the 421A program in 2021. The size of the bubble indicates the number of rent-stabilized units reported. The color of the bubble indicates if there are any irregularities in their reported units - red means we should look deeper into this building's practices.
Finally, clicking on each bubble will display information on the rent-stabilized units in the past three years (same as above tables) and will also include information on the property's assessed taxable value, the exempted value from 421A, and the total actual taxes paid.