Can a landlord lie to not renew the lease?
In NYC, Oakland, San Francisco, Boston and a few other places that have rent control/rent stabilization, a tenant in any apartment that falls under those regulation has the right to renew their lease, and the landlord MUST offer them a renewal lease.In NYC, where my company, RDNY.com specializes in apartment rentals, we alway tell our users that if given a choice of two apartments to rent, one rent stabilized and the other not stabilized, ALWAYS go for the rent stabilized apartment.The landlord MUST offer you a one or two year renewal lease at least 90 days prior to the end of your current lease AND the rent increases are limited to the amount allowed by the Rent Guidelines Board, as long as you are a tenant in good standing (i.e. you aren’t a nuisance to your neighbors and you’re current on the rent payments).If the landlord doesn’t send you an offer to renew at least 90 days prior to the expiration of your current lease, you are allowed to stay on in the apartment, at the old rent, until such time as you are presented with the offer to renew, and then you have 90 days to decide if you wish to renew for one or two years. It’s a great tenant protection!But there are situations where landlords might try to lie to get a tenant out. This usually occurs with brownstones or townhouses. The owner (landlord) can claim that he needs the apartment for his own use, either to expand his own apartment or because an immediate family member (son, daughter, father, mother) needs the apartment for their use. In such a case, they might very well get you out. Whether they use the now vacant apartment for their claimed purpose is another story, but usually they do.If your apartment is not rent stabilized or rent controlled, then a landlord doesn’t need to lie to you to get you out. They have the right to not renew your lease for any reason or even no reason whatsoever.Please note: I am not an attorney and this is not legal advice. It is merely my opinion, based on being in the NYC rental apartment business for 40 years.
How do people afford to live in NYC?
If you can find a way around housing costs, NYC isn’t particularly expensive. You don’t need a car, there are lots of cheap restaurants along with the expensive ones, and groceries are only marginally more costly.In my case, I found a rent-stabilized apartment after meeting a woman on OKCupid. Nothing happened romantically, but she lived in a building where an apartment was becoming available and was kind enough to refer me to the building's owner.But rent stabilization doesn’t mean what it used to. When I met my ex-wife in 1989, her apartment was $438 a month. (I would have lived there forever, but she insisted that we buy a co-op back when they were relatively cheap, which turned out to be an incredibly smart thing to do.)However, the rent-stabilized apartment that I live in now, eight blocks away, costs $1,850 a month. It’s much less than my neighbors pay, and not out of reach for me, but more than something comparable elsewhere in the US.My fantastic landlord allowed me to sublet the place when I found a job in DC and then moved to Mexico City, so I was able to come back to a relatively cheap place. Some people also use AirBnB and the Columbia and NYU off-campus housing exchanges to bring in subtenants and mitigate their rent.My son found a way around high rent via a sweetheart deal from the parents of one of his schoolmates. Even so, it's tight on his government salary, which was fine in Chicago but is barely adequate here.Solving the rent conundrum comes down to having a good local network that you can use to discover rental deals. Unless you’re a charismatic extrovert, that requires growing up in the city or at least living here for a long time, and always keeping an ear to the ground. Those stories about reading obituaries to find apartments are true.Unfortunately, once the rent-stabilized apartments are occupied by “insiders” like me and my son, the market-rate places available to everyone else get more expensive. Restrict supply and the market-clearing price goes up. The housing policies here — and in the Bay Area too, from what I read — are counterproductive.My philosophical choice would be to live in a place like Houston. If there’s more demand for houses, developers just build more houses. But Houston — excuse me, we say HOW-ston — isn’t Manhattan.Take care of the housing piece and NYC is a great place to live.