Lawmaker Floats Plan To Target Housing Crunch

City Council Member Tony Avella is proposing legislation that would allow the city to target, through levied fines, property owners who intentionally keep buildings and apartments vacant. Mr. Avella said the legislation, an "anti-warehousing" effort designed as a remedy for the city's housing crunch, would be announced at a press conference Saturday.

"There is a homeless crisis in the city of New York and we need to do everything we can to help make more apartments available," Mr. Avella said. "We need to encourage property owners to repair and make these apartments inhabitable. This is a proposal to discourage these owners from keeping these apartments off the market." According to a report compiled by the nonprofit organization Picture Homeless, which is helping to craft the new legislation, about 24,000 apartments could be created by renovating the city's abandoned buildings and living spaces. Mr. Avella said the legislation would target only those property owners who were intentionally keeping space unoccupied. He said the fines would be "open to discussion." A fund would then be set up to rehab distressed vacant units. A real estate attorney, Adam Leitman Bailey, said he was concerned about the proposed legislation. "I don't like any statute that allows the government to place restrictions on what hard-working property owners can do with their land," he said.