A report entitled "The New Housing Emergency" by the Community Service society released yesterday said that New York City is losing more than 10,000 "rent-protected" apartments a year.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver said at a news conference on the steps of City Hall that the city is losing affordable housing at an alarming rate and needs new laws to project what's left," according to an article by Julie Shapiro today at DNAinfo.com.

Mr. Silver said that "if we do not act quickly to extend our rent laws, millions of working New Yorkers could lose their homes," the article said, adding that he maintained that "the state's current rent laws expire June 15 and must be renewed before then to protect the city's 1.02 million rent-regulated apartments."

Mr. Silver, the article continued, said that "the state needs to go one step further and strengthen the existing laws, making it harder for landlords to deregulate apartments" adding that "the current laws allow landlords to increase the rent when an apartment becomes vacant or when landlords make major improvements to the building."

"We must close the loopholes identified in this report that cost our neighborhoods thousands of affordable homes each year and which threaten to turn New York into a city without a middle-class," Silver said.

The 14-page report, by the Community Service Society of New York, said that Manhattan tenants have been severely affected by the loss of affordable housing: in 2001, 52 percent of people who moved in Manhattan south of Harlem found a rent-regulated apartment, but by 2007 just 31 percent found a rent-regulated apartment.

Mr. Silver voiced strong support, the article said, "for an Assembly bill that would begin to reverse the loss of affordable housing by repealing vacancy decontrol, reducing the amount of extra rent a landlord can charge after making improvements and giving the city more control over rent laws." With his support, the legislation is likely to pass the Assembly but it "will likely face a tougher battle in the Republican-controlled State Senate," the article noted.

The report noted that the most recent New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey showed that in 2008 the median low-income rent-regulated tenant household in the city paid 48 percent of its income in rent, "far higher than the 30 percent rent burden that is generally considered the standard of affordability."

"There is no question," the report continued, "that vacancy destabilization is rapidly depleting the supply of rent-regulated apartments" and "apartments that remain subject to rent regulation are also becoming less affordable as a result of excessive rent increases allowed under current law."

The reported noted that "some of the rent increase mechanisms require landlords to spend money on apartment improvements, but others do not," adding that "the cost to the landlord is often very low compared to the advantages of destabilization" and "the lack of proactive enforcement by the state Housing and Community Renewal agency enables landlords to deregulate apartments without actually making the legally mandated improvements." Destabilization, it added, "is never investigated unless the new tenants in a deregulated apartment complains."

In 2009, the report said that landlords reported that "they removed 13,500 apartments from rent stabilization, and the number of report has been rising steadily. But landlords are not required to report destabilizations, so the true rate of deregulation is certainly much higher than that."

The report found that between 2000 and 2007 Manhattan lost 24 percent of its low-income affordable housing units and 17 percent of its middle-income affordable housing units.

It added that "a low-income family of three can afford a rent of about $880 a month in 2011," but "there are now few if any areas of the city and suburbs were one could fine a vacant two-bedroom apartment at that rent."