If the owner claims you don't actually live in your apartment - but you do, contact the tenant association. It's a tactic to get you out so Stellar can reap higher profits. The whole article excerpted below is worth reading.
In Columbia Apartment Battle, It’s The Long-Term Renters Who Pay
As for the nine buildings on the CoSo website that are entirely rent stabilized, the spokesperson characterized them as an investment and said the annual turnover rate for rental housing in New York is around 10 percent. However, according to the most recent Housing and Vacancy Survey commissioned three years ago by the Dept. of Housing Preservation and Development, the city’s “vacancy rate for rent stabilized units as a whole was 2.63 in 2011.”
That same report noted that the city has about 987,000 rent stabilized units, and that the overall citywide rental vacancy rate is less than five percent, which meets the legal definition of a housing emergency “as defined by New York State and City rent-regulation laws, requiring a continuation of both rent control and rent stabilization in the city.”
The Orbach Group, which holds property in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, first garnered attention for alleged tenant harassment four years ago in a New York Times article about investors that acquire distressed properties. The article from August 2010 quotes a tenant activist at Housing Conservation Coordinators as saying Orbach engages in vacancy decontrol, a process whereby a landlord raises rent on a stabilized unit to the point where it exits rent stabilization, and that the company is part of a wave of predatory investors that buy buildings and seek to evict certain tenants at the expense of affordable housing. The Times article said city officials, including then-city council speaker Christine Quinn, were “keeping an eye on Mr. Orbach’s buildings.”
