On February 14, 2025, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander revealed deficiencies in the New York City Department of Housing Preservation Tenant Interim Lease (TIL) program in a new audit. The audit shows that City Department of Housing Preservation and Development has only converted 13 buildings in the Tenant Interim Lease (TIL) program to co-ops since 2012. All of these projects incurred delays, some ranged from 15 to 87 months, and some delays were as long as six to eleven years.
In 1978, the City created the Tenant Interim Lease program to assist tenant associations development of low-income co-ops. The City is responsible for paying for needed capital repairs in these buildings. In 2012, the City Department of Housing Preservation and Development created the Affordable Neighborhood Cooperative Program which follows a new procedure. This procedure lacks a centralized system to track and analyze its performance resolving issues. This prevents the City from identifying and fixing systemic problems, hindering resource deployment, oversight, and the ability to prevent future delays.
Under the Affordable Neighborhood Cooperative Program, 81 out of the 113 buildings are still awaiting conversion. There are 45 buildings, impacting 802 units, that do not have an assigned developer and have not started needed rehabilitation. The residents living in the building with the longest wait entered the Tenant Interim Lease program in September 1997 and do not have a developer assigned to their building.
The City Comptroller’s auditors made several recommendations to improve processes. One recommendation was for the Department of Housing Preservation and Development to develop a centralized system to identify specific issues causing project delays. The goal of this data collection would be to analyze this information to determine the most frequent reasons for these delays. Another recommendation was for there to be improved collaboration between the City Council, the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget, and the Department of Buildings to create a more efficient approval process. In addition, the Comptroller’s office recommended the Department of Housing Preservation and Development determine methods to improve communication and relationships with tenants involved in the Tenant Interim Lease program.
Comptroller Brad Lander stated, “The residents of TIL buildings, who are disproportionately people of color, stayed put and fought to rebuild their communities during the devastation of disinvestment in the 1970s and 1980s, yet decades later, they are still waiting for the City to fulfill its promises. Mismanagement from City Hall hinders interagency collaboration, and the Mayor’s OMB repeatedly puts up blockades that keep these New Yorkers from achieving the American dream. The solutions are clear: release the funds from OMB that my office fought for and secured through the Battery Park City Authority Joint Operating fund and expedite hiring processes at OMB so that HPD has the staff to carry out their work. This would allow HPD to update its technology, significantly improve its efficiency, adopt the policy changes laid out in our office’s Building Blocks of Change report.
By: Chelsea Ramjeawan (Chelsea is the CityLaw intern and a New York Law School student, Class of 2025.)