Landlords and tenants are leaving money on the table.
I’m talking about SCRIE and DRIE, which stand for Senior Citizens Rent Increase Exemption and Disability Rent Increase Exemption.
These programs freeze the rent for certain tenants whose rent is more than one-third of their income. But unlike Zohran Mamdani’s promised rent freeze, landlords get a tax credit to make up the difference. Everybody wins.
Actually, only 42 percent win. A ridiculous 58 percent of the 160,000 tenants eligible for a rent freeze do not get one. They are not in the program.
Tenants need not be poor to qualify. In 2015, at the request of the de Blasio administration, then-Sen. Diane Savino carried a bill through Albany to make more tenants eligible. Her law raised the household income limit to $50,000.
“The biggest challenge after that was raising awareness,” she tweeted on Sunday. “Thousands of people still don’t know about the program or their landlords don’t think it applies to them.”
Even tenants who know about the program cannot navigate the process. Some landlords help their tenants apply. There’s also a helpline for tenants.
But the core problem is that applications for city and state programs are notoriously difficult to complete, especially for the targeted recipients — in this case, seniors and disabled people. Even those who succeed in this task lose the benefit if they fail to renew it.
Two city officials recently wrote an op-ed in City Limits to get more people to sign up. That was a good deed, but unfortunately the authors didn’t explain why more people don’t know about the program or why the process can’t be simplified — or even automated.
The city and state could use information from individual tax returns, apartment registration data and property tax records to pre-fill applications and mail them out to be signed and returned. Landlords could get notices of potentially eligible tenants.
These benefits are worth struggling for, but no one should have to.
What we’re thinking about: Are the 70 bribery convictions of NYCHA employees an indictment of the public housing model, or are private landlords and property managers similarly vulnerable to employees’ taking kickbacks from the contractors they select for jobs? Send thoughts to eengquist@therealdeal.com.
A thing we’ve learned: Ray Wohlfarth has written 14 books about boilers. Every time I see one of his “Boiler Room Detective” videos, I think about the old-time boiler mavens and how much expertise will be lost when they are gone. Most of them already are.
This matters most in cities like New York, where many heating systems are much older than the people servicing them. Reading and hearing Wohlfarth’s stories, I get the feeling that many steam or hot-water heating systems have been “fixed” over the years by people who didn’t understand them well, causing more problems down the road.
Elsewhere…
Mr. Pink is in the black.
Steve Buscemi, the actor who played a bank robber by that name in Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs,” sold his row house in Park Slope for a dollar short of $5 million. He and his late wife, the filmmaker and choreographer Jo Andres, had paid $579,000 in 1997, leaving him with a capital gain of about $4.2 million, less the cost of any significant improvements he made to the property.
Buscemi told the New York Times earlier this year that the townhouse is “not right for me anymore, you know? It’s just — it’s too big.” The actor and his new wife, Karen Ho, have moved to Manhattan.
In calculating the tax on the long-term capital gain on a principal residence, a couple can exclude $500,000 of the gain. That would still leave Buscemi and Ho with a hefty tax bill, unless they do a 1031 exchange by quickly buying a similar property. In that case they could defer the entire gain.
The $4,999,999 purchase price was no coincidence. It falls $1 shy of the threshold at which New York City’s mansion tax rises to 2.25 percent from 1.5 percent.
The buyers are a couple from the neighborhood. They moved from an apartment on Third Street. Similarly, Buscemi and Andres had moved from Ninth Street in 1997. Housing economists call this chain of relocations “filtering.”
The new owners (like Buscemi) each used a revocable trust for the transaction, which means they can eventually pass the row house to heirs without it going through probate. In Brooklyn, that can save a lot of hassle.
Closing time
Residential: The top residential deal recorded Tuesday was $13.3 million for a 2,455-square-foot condominium unit at 220 Central Park South. Deborah Kern of Corcoran had the listing.
Commercial: The top commercial deal recorded was $32.6 million for a development site at 1059-1061 2nd Avenue in Sutton Place. An entity tied to John K. Rapp sold the site to Krown Point Capital.
New to the Market: The highest price for a residential property hitting the market was $85 million for a 7,700-square-foot penthouse at 125 Perry Street in the West Village. The pre-war property was converted to a condominium in 2025 by Alf Naman. Jim St. André and the Hudson Advisory Team have the listing.
Breaking Ground: The largest new building permit filed was for a proposed 34,545-square-foot, six-story, mixed-use project at 376 East 139th Street in Mott Haven. Kendrick Lam filed the permit on behalf of Morris Yeroushalmi.
— Matthew Elo
