City to Publicly Shame Harassing Landlords

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    New York City officials will publicly post the names of landlords found to have harassed tenants, hoping the public shaming will be a deterrent.
    The mayor signed a bill on Tuesday that will require the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development to post on its website the names of landlords found in housing court to have harassed tenants.
    A 2008 city law prohibits tactics, such as interrupting utilities, that are intended to force tenants to vacate an apartment or waive tenancy rights. Such efforts have been on the rise in gentrifying neighborhoods of the city where market-rate rents have soared and some landlords try to engineer vacancies to make room for higher-paying tenants.
    Starting next year, landlords who run afoul of the anti-harassment law will face public exposure.
    “There are good landlords out there, but the ones who don’t do the right thing need to feel consequences,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio, who as the city’s public advocate ran a Worst Landlords Watchlist to highlight landlords with numerous open building violations.
    But tenant groups say many cases of withheld repairs, baseless eviction proceedings and other harassments go unreported because such cases are hard to prove and because tenants, if they lose, may be ordered to pay the landlord’s legal fees. Councilwoman Margaret Chin, who co-sponsored the bill, said the publicity would work with landlords who may be willing to risk civil penalties, but not their reputations.
    “A lot of them have investors, and the investors would have to ask, ‘Is this a good guy?’ ” she said. “This is to get it on the record who the bad actors are.”
    Housing officials said harassment complaints rose to 748 last year from 541 in 2012, but only a fraction of cases that reach housing court result in a finding of harassment. Of more than 3,600 cases filed since 2008, most have been dismissed, 810 led to settlements and 45 had a finding of harassment.
    Mitchell Posilkin, general counsel for the Rent Stabilization Association, the trade group for the city’s landlords, said the figures showed how unnecessary the law was. He said it would do little more than taint and “vilify” property owners and “curry favor with the tenant movement.”
    “It creates an impression that harassment is somehow a systemic problem,” he said. “Should a tenant have their name published for failing to pay rent?”
    A spokesman for the housing agency said the public would be able to find offenders by the landlord’s name and by building address. The department already lists building violations and litigation against landlords online, but this is the first time that cases of harassment will be added.
    The information must be placed on the website within 30 days of a finding of harassment.
    The new law also raises civil penalties for landlords who harass to a maximum of $10,000 per residential unit, from $5,000.
    A version of this article appears in print on October 1, 2014, on page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: City to Publicly Shame Harassing Landlords. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe