While the city struggles with a massive housing shortage, tens of thousands of rent-stabilized apartments are sitting empty across the Big Apple.

A whopping 57,000 rent-stabilized units sat vacant across the five boroughs in 2025, a 5.6% vacancy rate that is up from just 3.7% a decade earlier, according to state data obtained by the City Reporter. The data is self-reported from landlords of rent-stabilized buildings.

The vacancy rate ticked up to 7% in 2021, a year into the COVID pandemic, when the city’s population declined.

All boroughs but Manhattan saw vacancy rates climb between 2016 and 2025, the latest year for which data is available, according to the rates reported to the Division of Homes and Community Renewal. 

The reasons for the vacancies aren’t clear as the data doesn’t track why the units are dark or how much repair work they actually need.

One housing expert Brendan Mitchell, director of real estate and finance at the Bronx-based University Neighborhood Housing Program, suspects the vacancy spike is a hangover from the pandemic, with courts finally clearing out backlogged eviction cases after the moratorium lifted.

Contributing to the issue is the disparities in property owners’ costs and income.

Core Manhattan property owners saw their net operating incomes increase by 10%, compared to about 7% up in Queens and 4% up in Brooklyn and a drop in The Bronx, the data indicate.

Some property owners of the roughly 1 million rent-stabilized units in the city say they say they cannot afford to make the necessary major renovations.

Gutting a four-bedroom pre-war apartment can cost upwards of $50,000 — an impossible pill to swallow when the unit only brings in $800 a month, according to Mitchell. 

Owners of rent-stabilized units can only raise rents so much due to caps determined by the city’s Rent Guidelines Board, which recently approved a rent freeze for the next two years. Plus, the state enacted the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, which prevents owners from bumping up the rent on empty units past city limits.

“A lot of real estate professionals will say, ‘It just doesn’t pay to gut-renovate an apartment in the city because I can’t raise the rent,’” Mark Bourbeau, president of Sycamore Birch Management, which oversees 50 properties in The Bronx, told the City Reporter.