City Council Revives Landlord Seizure Plan, Promising Relief—But Only for the Worst Offenders

New York City weighs a revamped “third-party transfer” programme that could reshape the dynamics of urban housing and landlord accountability.

New York City’s skyline, for all its grandeur, hides countless dilapidated apartment blocks: over 2,000 privately owned residential buildings racked up more than 230,000 housing code violations in 2025 alone. For the tenants condemned to leaking ceilings and faulty heat, official slogans about fairness ring hollow. It is no surprise, then, that Mayor Zohran Mamdani has zeroed in on the city’s most notorious landlords with a campaign promise as dramatic as any made in recent memory—seize chronically mismanaged buildings and hand them to new stewards.

This month, City Council members debated a controversial measure designed to give City Hall exactly that power. The proposed “Safer Homes Act” would allow the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) to wrest control of residential properties from landlords who pile up dangerous violations, unpaid tax bills, and city repair debt. If enacted, it would resurrect elements of the city’s erstwhile “third-party transfer” (TPT) programme, shuttered in 2019 amid an outcry over its unintended consequences for small, mostly minority, property owners.

The new proposal claims a narrower focus, zeroing in on what Councilmember Pierina Sanchez, lead sponsor and housing committee chair, calls the “worst of the worst.” Under the draft text, buildings face seizure if their unpaid taxes exceed a quarter of assessed value (or 15% if compounded by pervasive code violations or $1,000 in emergency city repairs per unit). The city’s housing agency would maintain a running table of the city’s most distressed properties, targeting true recidivists.

Sanchez and her allies cite horror stories to justify the bill’s edge. The landlord Daniel Ohebshalom, owner of battered Washington Heights buildings, was twice arrested in 2024 following an incident in which a ceiling collapse injured a child. Criminal charges are ongoing, but tenants remain at his mercy—proving, in Sanchez’s view, the paltry deterrent power of current civil remedies.

Yet the bill’s future is hardly assured. Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, crucial gatekeeper for any vote, withholds her endorsement. For some in the real estate sector, the prospect of involuntary transfers chills the market. Still, politically disparate backers, including tenant groups and a cadre of institutional landlords keen to burnish their reputations, have lined up in qualified support.

The stakes for the city’s housing system are sizeable. New York’s rental stock, infamous for deferred maintenance and legal complexity, comprises over two million units—an outsized share managed by mid-size owners. Any enforcement scheme risks unintended pain for mom-and-pop landlords, particularly those operating on thinner margins in gentrifying districts. That same tension doomed the last TPT programme, which a 2019 review found had disproportionately stripped homes from lower-income owners of colour, often with scant compensation.

At the same time, the city’s chronic enforcement failures bode ill for any claim to national leadership. For years, HPD has been hamstrung: it investigates roughly 600,000 code complaints annually, yet rarely brings the hammer down. For tenants, legal routes are labyrinthine; for flagrant owners, financial penalties remain, at best, a rounding error. The new proposal attempts to calibrate the balance—concentrating on repeat bad actors, sparing smaller fish, and instating a public ranking to shame serial offenders.

For New Yorkers, the immediate implication is twofold. The policy promises relief for the most imperilled tenants, in units potentially numbering in the low thousands, but may simultaneously reduce the appetite for private stewardship among risk-averse owners. Some landlords, perhaps fearing governmental overreach or expropriation, could further pare back investment in low-income housing—portending even shabbier dwellings, or sales to deeper-pocketed, less community-minded firms.

Secondary ripples cannot be ignored. If seizures become more common without careful due process and proper compensation, legal battles could clog already-overloaded courts and increase insurance and financing costs for multifamily buildings citywide. Political flashpoints are also likely: an ambitious, left-leaning mayor meets a business class with scant trust in government process. This is hardly a formula for swift consensus.

Other American cities will observe with keen interest. Similar complaints about recalcitrant landlords abound in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, but municipal interventions there have so far been tepid. New York’s previous efforts at large-scale property transfer, both during the nadir of the 1970s fiscal crisis and the more recent 1996–2019 TPT era, yielded lessons in both promise and peril. If the new regime manages to excise only the most feral landlords—without collateral damage to smaller, diligent owners—it could offer a template for reform elsewhere.

Learning from the past, hedging for the future

Proponents point to safeguards: improved notice requirements, objective scoring metrics, and a public listing of “distressed” buildings. These augur well for transparency but are hardly fail-safes against overzealous seizure or bureaucratic inertia. Legal definitions—what makes a landlord “chronically negligent,” for example—pose a perennial challenge.

Nor will practical matters relent. Identifying responsible replacement owners is a taller order than it first appears. Non-profit and institutional managers are hardly immune to corner-cutting, nor is the city apparatus famed for nimble property stewardship. The pipeline for vetted, mission-oriented owners with both capital and community ties remains puny.

There is political calculation as well. Mayoral ambitions for “seizing” buildings win applause in the tenant press but court backlash among would-be investors. For the council, the bill’s fate hinges on Speaker Adams’ calculus: will action on slumlords outweigh anxiety over government overreach? In a city where property politics have long trumped prudent governance, the answer remains stubbornly uncertain.

For now, what bodes for the wider public is incremental, not radical, change. The Safer Homes Act is neither a panacea nor a blunt instrument. If executed with data-driven restraint and procedural fairness, its impact could be salutary, nudging owner behaviour at the margins. Mishandled, it risks another cycle of legal wrangling, displacement, and—ironically—worsening conditions for the tenants it aims to protect.

We reckon a city as layered and unruly as New York must embrace both ambition and humility. Exposing the worst landlords to meaningful sanction is overdue; imposing due process and limiting collateral damage will determine whether this experiment is merely the next chapter in a long saga of unintended consequences, or the start of genuine reform. ■