HSTPA, the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019, is the New York law that rewrote the state’s rent regulation system. Signed on June 14, 2019, it made rent stabilization permanent by removing the sunset provisions that had forced periodic renewal, and it allowed any New York municipality with a housing emergency to opt into stabilization through the Emergency Tenant Protection Act. For a board or owner of a building with regulated units, HSTPA is the framework that now governs how stabilized rents are set, raised, and audited.
The law closed the two main routes out of regulation, eliminating high-rent and high-income (luxury) deregulation, and it repealed the vacancy bonus and longevity increases that once let rents jump between tenancies. Preferential rents are now held for the length of a tenancy, and the period DHCR or a court can review to decide an overcharge was extended from four years to six. HSTPA also capped what owners can recover through major capital and individual apartment improvements; later state budget amendments adjusted the individual apartment improvement caps, so current figures should be confirmed against HCR guidance. The practical effect for owners is a tighter rent calculation and longer overcharge exposure.
Because HSTPA turned rent setting into a record-keeping problem as much as a legal one, the safest position is a clean, current file on every regulated unit. MD Squared manages annual DHCR registrations, rent-increase consultations, and renewal calculations for the buildings it oversees, and brings in rent stabilization counsel when a question reaches overcharge or deregulation territory. Explore our Rent Stabilization Consulting service, or contact us to walk through your stabilized units.
