NYC Occupied-building Work: Permits, Harassment and Tenant Protection

The instinct to treat "get the DOB permit" as the whole job is exactly where occupied-building projects run into trouble. Four distinct legal requirements can apply to the same renovation, issued by different city and state authorities, and clearing one doesn't clear the others.

The DOB permit authorizes the physical construction work itself. The Tenant Protection Plan is a supplemental filing tied to that same permit application, required whenever residential units in the building are occupied during the work, regardless of the project's size. Tenant harassment exposure exists independently of either filing; specific conduct during a renovation, not just the renovation's existence, can trigger it. And if the building has rent-stabilized units, MCI or IAI rules determine whether and how the landlord can eventually recover the cost of the work through rent, an entirely separate track from anything DOB or HPD requires.

Missing any one of these doesn't just create a paperwork gap. A project that has its DOB permit but skips the Tenant Protection Plan can be flagged during inspection. A project proceeding smoothly on the construction side can still generate a harassment finding if tenants experience the work as coercive, regardless of whether the contractor followed every DOB rule. Treating these as one checklist item, rather than four separate ones, is the most common and costly mistake.

This is the requirement landlords most often miss entirely, because it isn't the DOB permit itself, it's a supplemental document filed alongside it. Under Local Law 106 of 2019, a Tenant Protection Plan is required for construction work in any building with one or more occupied residential units, and the threshold is broad: single-family and multi-family dwellings, mixed-use buildings with a residential component, hotels and other overnight-accommodation buildings, and loft-law buildings in otherwise commercial structures. It applies to projects ranging from a single apartment update to a full building renovation, and it covers exterior-only work, landscape construction, and basement work, not just interior alterations.

The plan has to address how essential services will be maintained, how safe egress will be preserved during construction, and how tenants will actually be communicated with throughout the project. It's prepared by the project's registered design professional and, since a 2020 update, has to be signed by both the owner and the permit applicant, with a statement on the construction documents confirming compliance.

The one meaningful exception is work in a wholly commercial building with no residential units at all, which may require an Occupant Protection Plan instead, a related but distinct filing.

Separate from any permit or plan, specific conduct during a renovation can independently constitute tenant harassment under NYC's Administrative Code. This law was originally enacted in 2008, providing injunctive relief as a remedy, and was significantly expanded in 2017 to add monetary damages, punitive damages, and attorney's fees as available remedies as well. That expansion matters directly for occupied-building work: a project that's fully permitted and technically compliant with the Tenant Protection Plan can still generate a harassment finding if tenants experience specific conduct during the work as coercive or as an attempt to pressure them out.

Because construction inherently involves noise, dust, and temporary disruption, the line between legitimate project impact and conduct that crosses into harassment isn't always obvious from the contractor's side. This is genuinely a legal-review question rather than something a general overview can resolve for a specific project; the severity of any remedy has been described as tied to the severity of the underlying conduct, which means the analysis is fact-specific in a way this article isn't positioned to walk through project by project.

If any unit in the building is rent-stabilized, work to building-wide systems, boilers, windows, electrical rewiring, plumbing, roofs, generally falls under Major Capital Improvement rules rather than the individual-unit process described next. MCI work assumes the tenant remains in place throughout; it isn't a mechanism for ending a tenancy, it's a cost-recovery mechanism.

Before collecting any rent increase tied to MCI work, the landlord needs state approval, and stabilized tenants receive notice of the application with an opportunity to respond before it's granted. The resulting increase is capped at 2% annually and has to be removed from the rent entirely 30 years after it takes effect. An owner who misses the window to apply the increase, within 120 days of the lawful collection date or the next lease renewal, whichever is later, can lose the ability to collect it.

Work inside a specific stabilized unit, rather than the building as a whole, generally falls under Individual Apartment Improvement rules instead. Unlike MCI, IAI work doesn't require state pre-approval before the landlord can collect an associated rent increase, but for an occupied unit, it does require the tenant's written, informed consent, filed on a specific form with before-and-after documentation of the work.

This distinction matters because landlords sometimes assume that because IAI doesn't need pre-approval to collect the increase, it also doesn't need the tenant's agreement to do the work in the first place. It does, for an occupied unit specifically. Proceeding with interior work in an occupied stabilized apartment without that documented consent creates exposure on the rent-recovery side even if the physical work itself is otherwise permitted and compliant.