When a rent-stabilized apartment's built-in HVAC fails and a landlord offers window units in its place, state law has a specific answer: that substitution doesn't hold. DHCR Form RA-81 can freeze a stabilized tenant's rent until the original service is restored.

A Brooklyn rent-stabilized tenant posted online this week that the central HVAC unit in their apartment began leaking coolant. An HVAC technician declared it unrepairable. The landlord's response, after several rounds of calls: window units. The tenant isn't satisfied. Under state rent regulation, they have specific legal standing to say so — and a form to file.

Under the Rent Stabilization Code, an owner must provide and maintain all required and essential services that were part of the apartment at the time of occupancy. New York State Homes and Community Renewal (DHCR), which administers the code, makes the scope explicit: the obligation covers "ancillary services such as garage and recreational facilities," and extends to "services that were provided but not registered by the owner with DHCR." Central air and integrated HVAC systems, if they came with a stabilized unit, fall within that framework. Swapping them out for window units — which cover fewer rooms, generate more noise, and are not a like-for-like replacement — does not discharge the obligation.

The lease in this case contains a rider clause stating the landlord "is not responsible for repairing the HVAC Unit due to negligence on the part of the Tenant." The tenant says the filters were replaced on schedule. But even if the factual dispute were closer, a lease clause cannot waive a landlord's statutory obligation under rent stabilization — the Rent Stabilization Code's service-maintenance requirement is not a contract term that a rider can disclaim.

The specific instrument for this situation is DHCR Form RA-81, the Application for a Rent Reduction Based Upon Decreased Service(s) — Individual Apartment, filed with DHCR's Office of Rent Administration. If ORA finds a decrease in services, it orders the rent reduced to the level in effect before the most recent rent guidelines increase, and no further increase is permitted until the owner obtains a rent restoration order from DHCR. If the owner fails to comply with a DHCR order within 30 days, the tenant can escalate with Form RA-22.1, Tenant Affirmation of Non-Compliance.

That is a meaningfully different mechanism from the cooling-season legislation The Dissent covered in July — that law creates a new landlord AC obligation beginning in 2030, and offers nothing to unprotected tenants in the meantime. The RA-81 path exists now, and it is available specifically to stabilized tenants who had a service and lost it.

Filing an HPD housing-maintenance complaint in parallel is also appropriate: a unit from which central cooling has been removed, or which contains a system leaking coolant, may support a Class B or Class C violation depending on temperature conditions and the season. HPD complaints build the record that matters if the situation reaches Housing Court.

The Rent Stabilization Code was written in part to prevent exactly this kind of downgrade — a landlord accepting the regulatory framework that keeps the rent below market, while quietly removing the services that justified it.