In 2020, Enitte Cabrera, 59, enrolled in the city’s Disability Rent Increase Exemption program (DRIE), which freezes a participant’s rent and exempts them from future hikes, providing a tax abatement credit to their landlord to cover the difference between the frozen rent and the amount the owner would otherwise charge.
To qualify, tenants must live in a rent-regulated apartment, earn less than $50,000 a year, receive some kind of disability benefit and spend at least a third of their monthly income on rent. The city also runs a similar program for seniors on fixed incomes.
DRIE allowed Cabrera, who suffers from seizures due to epilepsy as well as arthritis and other health issues, to freeze the rent for her Bronx apartment — a stabilized unit on the fourth floor of a building on Creston Avenue — at $755.55 per month, a small break from the current $864.86 monthly price on the unit. With the freeze in place, her rent remained affordable, though just barely, since her only income is $934 a month in retirement and supplemental Social Security benefits.
But in 2023, after unexpected seizures caused her twice to fall down the narrow stairs in her building, Cabrera got a letter from her health care provider explaining her need for a unit closer to the ground floor, and her landlord was able to offer her a first-floor apartment in another building a few blocks away.
Despite having one fewer bedroom than her previous place, the rent on that unit was more expensive — roughly $1,600 a month — though her landlord’s real estate broker told her they’d be able to transfer her DRIE rent freeze to the new place. She moved, and all seemed well at first.
But not long after moving into the new unit, the lawsuit says, Cabrera was “shocked and dismayed” to learn that her prior rent freeze would no longer apply. Because of the move, the city’s Department of Finance (DOF), which administers the program, said she now owed $1,524 per month in rent, significantly more than what she earns each month.
— what her attorney says amounts to a reasonable accommodation request,
Under the Disability Rent Increase Exemption (DRIE), the city will freeze a participant’s rent at its current level and exempt them from future hikes, providing a tax abatement credit to their landlord to cover the difference between the frozen rent and the amount the owner would otherwise charge.
tenants with disabilities whose incomes are less than
