Is a “Tenant Advocate” Coming to the Department of Buildings?

City Councilwoman Helen Rosenthal, who represents the Upper West Side of Manhattan, has proposed a bill called “Int. No. 1523” that could affect every construction, renovation and building-maintenance project at co-ops and condos across New York City.

The bill seeks to create a new office of the Tenant Advocate inside the Department of Buildings (DOB), charged with overseeing all work on occupied multi-family dwellings. The Tenant Advocate’s duties would include approving mandated tenant protection and site safety plans, establishing a system to field questions and complaints, monitoring work sites to make sure they’re in compliance with safety plans, and delivering detailed quarterly reports to the mayor and the speaker of the city council. All work would be covered, including the renovation and combining of apartments, and exterior work mandated by Local Law 11.

Sean Fitzpatrick, councilwoman Rosenthal’s legislative director, explains the motivation behind the bill: “We’ve had a number of complaints over the last four years when a building owner has been doing renovation work or upgrades, and tenants have had a very hard time communicating with the DOB. People haven’t felt confident that their safety was taken into consideration. We’ve seen landlords use construction as a form of harassment for rent-controlled tenants to get them out so they could convert the apartment to market-rate. Conversion can be very ugly.”

Fitzpatrick adds that the current requirement for a Tenant Protection Plan uses “boilerplate” language, and there’s an inadequate system in place for the DOB to follow up and make sure the work is being done in compliance with the plan.

“The DOB is always trying to figure out ways to fulfill its many roles – engineering, site safety, and the safety of residents,” Fitzpatrick says. “An office where this is its only job – that’s what’s new to the conversation.”

Predictably, the prospect of an added layer of bureaucracy inside the Department of Buildings is not generating widespread applause.

“It sounds like it would make an already-difficult situation more difficult,” says Eric Cowley, president of Cowley Engineering, which does exterior work on roofs, facades and parking areas. “We’re already answering to the DOB inspectors. Jobs get stopped for relatively trivial reasons now. I see this Tenant Advocate as another hurdle we’d have to jump through.”

“I’m all for safety,” says Deborah Koplovitz, an attorney with the firm Anderson Kill. “But the question for me is: is this really necessary? As a co-op and condo lawyer, I would want to make sure it isn’t going to slow down a Local Law 11 project and make it more expensive.”

Int. No. 1523 will be the subject of a hearing before the city council’s Committee on Housing and Buildings on April 19.