ANHD Statement on Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants

New York, NY – ANHD commends Mayor de Blasio for his announcement of the new Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants. Taking a comprehensive approach to protect tenants is an important step forward. This is an especially urgent issue since the problem of tenant harassment has grown into a crisis as landlords increasingly use harassing tactics to push-out low-rent paying tenants. This crisis threatens the stability of families and neighborhoods across the city, and is undermining much of our current affordable housing. New York City passed legislation to create important new tenant protection programs in 2017, including Certificate of No Harassment (CONH), Right to Counsel, the Stand for Tenant Safety package, and the Speculation Watch List. However, these tools only work if they are carefully and fully implemented.

We also commend the Mayor for his energetic approach to addressing the City’s most distressed apartment buildings by working with mission-driven non-profit developers to preserve affordable housing.

The new Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants is an important additional step by the Mayor to direct focused, coordinated resources and capacity towards the fight for decent housing and tenant’s rights, and will have a significant impact on tenants across the city.

About the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development (ANHD):

The Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development (ANHD) is the umbrella organization of 100 non-profit affordable housing and economic development groups, serving low- and moderate-income residents in all five boroughs of New York City.  Since its founding in 1974, ANHD has been key in making NYC’s community development sector among the most effective in the US, providing comprehensive training, robust capacity-building and apprenticeship programs, and high-impact policy research. In the past 25 years, ANHD’s non-profit members have built over 120,000 units of affordable housing in our city’s most distressed neighborhoods.

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