The Landlords Are Merging

Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photo: Getty

Look out, the landlords are uniting. The Community Housing Improvement Program and the Rent Stabilization Association, which have long represented rent-stabilized landlords in New York, are getting closer to merging, per The Real Deal.

RSA represents 25,000 landlords who together own around 1 million rent-stabilized apartments across the city. CHIP, which was founded in 1966 and is the more vocal of the two organizations, represents some 4,000. It’s also apparently struggling to keep the lights on. The Real Deal obtained a financial report revealing that without RSA’s help — in the form of $655,000 in cash infusions so far — the organization would likely have become insolvent. Jay Martin, CHIP’s executive director, told The Real Deal that the organization has always operated “hand to mouth,” but it seems as though recent campaigns have exacerbated its money problems. The organization has been burning money on campaigns that have largely stalled in the past few years, including aggressively lobbying for a bill that would reset rents on vacant stabilized units and pushing for the city’s Rent Guidelines Board to set higher rent increases. They also teamed up with RSA to try to challenge the entire rent-stabilization system, a case that ultimately found its way to the Supreme Court before the justices declined to hear the challenge.

If the merger goes through next year, owner-members will have one less set of dues to pay, but not much else will change in terms of their primary goal, which is, of course, killing rent stabilization.