Overcharged for your rent in a NY regulated building? There’s a backlog of 3,400 complaints.

Tenants in rent-regulated apartments say they’re left languishing for months — if not years — on a decision from the state agency charged with investigating landlord overcharge complaints as backlogs persist and rents in New York reach new highs.

For years, the state’s Division of Homes and Community Renewal has struggled to keep pace with tenant complaints amid bureaucratic red tape, dated computer operating systems and a dwindling workforce. But New York’s rent overhauls in June 2019 and the COVID-19 pandemic that followed months after exacerbated long-standing issues at the agency as it contends with a wave of staff retirements and attrition, tenant lawyers and elected officials said.

The DHCR acknowledges that it is struggling to keep pace with complaints as its Office of Rent Administration contends with a backlog of 3,400 complaints that roughly two dozen staffers are assigned to investigate, agency spokeswoman Charni Sochet said.

After waiting more than two years for a decision from the DHCR, Upper Manhattan resident Teddy Thomas abandoned his plans to go through the state agency for a resolution and instead hired a lawyer earlier this year to hash out his overcharge complaint in court.

Thomas had spent 18 months looking for an apartment he could afford when he finally found one in 2017 that was close to his new job at Columbia University.

Thomas submitted an application for a one-bedroom apartment in Hamilton Heights, priced at $2,200 a month. But his approval came with a caveat: The landlord would grant him the apartment if he was willing to pay $2,300 a month because of his shaky credit history.

“I was like, that's kind of weird, but OK, fine. You know, because I didn’t have the best credit at the time,” Thomas said in a recent interview.

The landlord assured him that he was getting a break, and said the actual rent was $2,686 a month.

“It seemed fishy to me, given how small the apartment was, given some of the other apartments I'd seen. It just didn’t seem in the ballpark,” Thomas said.

Aside from being close to his workplace, the apartment was rent-stabilized, meaning that the rent would not be subject to the mercurial moves of the rental market and could only be raised a certain amount each year.

Persistent water leaks, vermin, and holes in the wall raised Thomas’ suspicions, so he finally asked the DHCR for the unit’s rent history and found out that the previous tenant had paid $1,261 a month, almost half of what his rent was.

In December 2019, he filed a rent overcharge complaint with the DHCR and waited.

“The landlord never gave me any explanation and DHCR was radio silent other than a docketing notification that came two weeks later,” Thomas said.

After two years waiting for a response, Thomas filed a public records request to get some insight into his case. He got back a thick packet of documents with the landlord’s response to his complaint, which had been filed with the agency only months after he had filed his original complaint.

“DHCR never bothered to notify me, never reached out, never sent me a copy — nothing,” he said.

The landlord justified the increase by claiming a renovation to the apartment that Thomas says never happened.

“I didn’t respond at DHCR, but I reviewed what was filed by both the landlord and the tenant and I do not think that there’s validity to the tenant’s claim,” said John Bianco, the lawyer for the LLC that owns the building.

Fed up, Thomas decided to get a lawyer and hash it out with the landlord in court, a route that can resolve the issue in months. Although he moved out of the apartment, his overcharge case is still pending in court.

Pandemic hastens agency problems

It’s not out of the ordinary for overcharge complaints to languish for years, according to tenants, lawyers, elected officials, and housing advocates.

The Met Council on Housing, one of the city's oldest tenant advocacy groups, said that it usually sees the process take two to four years before a decision is handed down on an overcharge complaint, but it’s not unusual for it to take four years or longer.

“To ask them to wait two to four years or more to pay a rent that they can't afford makes it impossible for a lot of people and it means that they simply self-evict before they can even get a decision or before they can even start to challenge their rent,” said Kate Ehrenberg, the director of the Met Council’s hotline.

Prior to the pandemic — just months after state legislators passed a historic overhaul of New York’s rent laws curtailing the tools landlords have to increase rents on regulated apartments — it took an average of 24 months just to get an overcharge case assigned to an examiner in the DHCR’s Office of Rent Administration. Once assigned, it could take between six and nine months to process the case.

Although the DHCR declined to say how long on average it takes for cases to resolve, Sochet acknowledged that the agency suffers from a deep backlog as it fields more than 20,000 cases each year.

In the last five years, the Office of Rent Administration has returned nearly $12.6 million in rent to overcharged tenants, Sochet said.

“New York state has zero tolerance for landlords who unlawfully overcharge tenants, and DHCR is committed to protecting the rights of rent-regulated tenants by enforcing and administering the law as enacted by the Legislature and interpreted by the courts,” Sochet said in a statement.

A series of audits by state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli going back to 2013 identified a host of issues with the agency and identified remedial measures. In 2014, DHCR hired a firm to create a computerized case management system to streamline the agency and offer some relief.

But four years later the $4.8 million contract was abandoned with no work done to create a modern computerized system. State officials and the company, Accenture, would not say why the work was not completed. Although the housing watchdog agency told the comptroller’s office it would find a new vendor to complete the work in 2018, there’s still no system in place.

Attrition at the agency has also led to staffing problems, which were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“They’ve had lots of retirements of long-term people and they’ve had trouble filling positions and keeping up with the workload,” said state Sen. Brian Kavanagh of Manhattan, who chairs the chamber’s housing committee.

Where the agency once had 119 people investigating overcharge complaints, it now has 31, according to Sochet.

"It really is incumbent upon them to get staffed up and clear the backlog and I have some sympathy for the COVID situation," Kavanagh added.

Currently, three jobs at DHCR — two rent examiners and an auditor — are listed as open on the state employment website.

A common ground for tenants and landlords

Matthew Chachere, a tenant lawyer who works with the Northern Manhattan Improvement Corp., recalled one case that started in the first Obama administration, as he put it, and was only recently finalized in 2021 — nine years later.

“The ordinary tenant gets lost in this,” he said. “They're certainly not going to have the means or the inclination to spend the money that it takes to fight this out. It's terrible.”

Part of the issue is the back-and-forth nature of the complaint system, Chachere said.

“They do this kind of ping-pong thing,” he said. “I answered the landlord's response. Now, [DHCR] sends it to the landlord, and he's saying the same thing. And I'm saying the same thing. Just decide the damn case.”

It’s a unique criticism where tenant lawyers and the building owners they’re fighting against find common ground.

“It is a terrible system. It is woefully incompetent,” said Jay Martin, executive director of the Community Housing Improvement Program, a trade group that represents landlords of rent-regulated buildings. “It actually benefits the property owner for these cases to be cleared up much quicker and it's expensive.”

The long-standing delays within the agency and back-and-forth between tenants and landlords means building owners have to shoulder higher legal fees.

“When a tenant alleges an overcharge complaint, it is a big deal,” Martin said. “It's an accusation of fraud. It’s like a sword of Damocles hanging over them throughout this entire process until it's adjudicated. So, they would prefer a system that didn’t cost them money every time they have to contact their attorney.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated details on the cases the Division of Housing and Community Renewal fields each year.  A spokesperson for DHCR clarified that it fields 20,000 cases total each year, including overcharge complaints.