Am I rent-stabilized? New website helps you find out

By Leigh Kamping-Carder | March 5, 2015 - 10:30AM

Are you unknowingly living in a rent-stabilized apartment, paying hundreds of dollars more than you should every month? It's the kind of weird fear that probably only exists in New York, but with an estimated 1 million stabilized rentals in the city, it’s an important question to ask—and an even harder question to answer.

Enter amirentstabilized.com, a searchable database of rent-stabilized buildings in New York and the creation of Parsons MFA student Chris Henrick. (H/t to DNAinfo for pointing out the site.)

While landlords are required to include language in leases and renewals letting tenants know about the stabilized status of their apartments, in practice, this doesn’t always happen (and won’t necessarily help if you’re still hunting for a rental). The city also maintains a list of rent-stabilized buildings, but it’s not exactly user-friendly—more like a gigantic PDF than a searchable database.

Here’s where amirentstabilized.com comes in: you simply type in an address, and the building comes up orange if it’s likely to be stabilized. The one downside is that it only deals with buildings, not individual apartments, so you can’t tell if your specific rental is covered. (That’s likely because the stabilization calculation depends a lot on who lived there before you, when they moved out, how much they paid, and what kind of renovations and other improvements have been done to the place over the years.) But the site points users toward city and state agencies where you can get a definitive answer, as well as instructions on how to take action on the information.

My exasperating, enlightening, ultimately successful search for rent-stabilized digs

Ask Sam: How do I find out if my apartment's supposed to be rent-stabilized--and my landlord owes me money? (sponsored)

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