Council committee hears HPD plan to overhaul third‑party transfer program in 'Safer Homes Act'

The New York City Council Committee on Housing and Buildings heard testimony on Intro 657, the Safer Homes Act, a proposal to retool the city’s third‑party transfer (TPT) program to target the most severely distressed residential buildings while expanding homeowner protections and tenant pathways to ownership.

Rosa Kelly, chief of staff to the commissioner at the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), told the committee the program is intended for a narrow slice of the housing stock where “years of unpaid municipal debt and persistent hazardous housing conditions” require intervention. “HPD views the program as a key part of our broader enforcement and preservation toolkit to ensure that housing remains safe and livable for New Yorkers,” Kelly said.

Why the bill changes selection: HPD and its staff said the proposal replaces the older statutory‑distress definition and the so‑called block‑pickup rule—under which one qualifying building could trigger transfers across a block—with a two‑step approach. First, buildings must meet type‑specific arrears thresholds (for example, tax class 1 would need arrears exceeding roughly three years of annual tax liability; HDFC rentals two years; class 2 rentals one year). Second, an indexing system would score properties on municipal debt and recent class B/C housing violations so that the agency “picks up the worst of the worst,” Kelly said. HPD presented…