Ilan Rabinovich (SPONY) supports electronic registration, opposes Intro 649
Rabinovich thanks CM Banks for the electronic registration bill, describing how HPD loses paper registrations while always cashing the $13 fee. He opposes Intro 649, arguing ownership is already documented with HPD and DHCR, and lobbies are not the place to list beneficial owners who have no operational role.
Good afternoon, Chair Sanchez and the rest of the Housing Committee.
I'm Ilan Rabinovich speaking for Small Property Owners of New York.
Wanted to come and thank Councilmember Banks and his team, especially Kyle Graham, for their work on the modernization program for HPD's registration process.
What seems like a very...
Minor thing, sending in the name and contact information for the owner of your building and the management, it's quite hard.
You mail it in, HPD loses it almost every year.
We hear about it from our owners all the time.
We enter it on our computers first.
We then print out a PDF.
We then mail in a PDF.
We sometimes mail it in certified.
They then lose it.
DOF never loses our $13 checks, though.
They always cash those.
So we do think it's important that the system be modernized in a way that lets HPD reach us when emergencies happen.
And so one thing I want to point out is that this bill started off as a conversation in the lobby of this building.
We were here last year to testify against COPA.
And in the hall, we managed to meet with Councilmember Banks and have some of his staff and point out some of the challenges with the housing code.
And this is just the first one of many things we hope we'll be able to partner with the committee and with the wider council on resolving.
We've identified...
Dozens of
crazy rules in the housing code that probably haven't made sense since the 1950s or 60s, and we'd love to partner with the council on addressing them.
This is what good government looks like.
We identify friction that creates pain for owners, for tenants, and for everybody, and then we work together to fix it, rather than using that friction to beat owners over the head and then use COPA or something to take their properties away.
Conversely to that bill from Council Member Banks that we support, I do want to say that we oppose Intro 649.
Ownership is already well documented with HPD, with DHCR, and with many other city agencies.
Our lobbies are not the places to list who the minor owners in an LLC might be.
They're also not the people that can help you when you have a broken boiler or a hot water issue.
need a repair or have a question about how to pay your rent.
That goes to the property manager that's listed with HPD.
That goes to the operating partner, but not to a child who might be the beneficiary of a trust somewhere.
So we hope that you can focus on our privacy and on providing good housing instead.
Thank you.