Sherwin Belkin to Retire

It’s the end of an era for New York’s landlord class: Sherwin Belkin is retiring.

Belkin, a co-founding partner at Belkin Burden Goldman, is perhaps one of the city’s best-known landlord-side attorneys. After 50 years of practicing law, he plans to retire in October.

His departure closes out a decadeslong career spent in the trenches of the rent-stabilization, where he had a front-row seat to New York’s ever-shifting housing laws and the increasingly fraught politics surrounding them.

“Over the years, I think it’s become an increasingly challenging environment to represent owners, managers, and developers,” Belkin said. “For small- and mid-size owners, it’s become crushing the amount of regulation that they have to deal with.”

Belkin and his partners started the firm in 1989 with a small staff. Today the practice has 65 attorneys, all focused on real estate.

Belkin began his legal career in the 1970s at New York’s Conciliation and Appeals Board, which administered rent stabilization. After a two-year stint in the judicial system handling criminal and housing court appeals, he transitioned into representing landlords in rent-stabilization matters.

In the 1990s, that largely meant helping landlords deregulate their units and charge market rent. He once told New York Magazine that he had evacuated an estimated 500 apartments in 1998 and expected a similar rate for 1999. This work meant sometimes talking to supers and hiring private investigators to learn more about tenants and offer buyouts or proposals.

“In my experience,” he told the magazine, “it’s the very rare tenant who has no price.”

Belkin became prominent enough that the New York Observer covered his condo purchase in 2014 — a pair of combined units in Flatiron for $4.1 million.

Over the years he worked on some of the city’s best-known landlord-side cases. He represented Zeckendorfs to empty out the Mayflower Hotel, which was demolished in 2004 and became 15 Central Park West in 2008. At Waterside Plaza, a 1970s-era Mitchell-Lama project, Belkin negotiated an agreement that kept the development’s four towers outside of rent-stabilization, in return for modest rent increases.

Alongside those marquee projects came stranger assignments, including, defending a landlord accused by a tenant of conducting nuclear fission experiments in the building.

“How do you know it’s not nuclear fusion?” he recalled asking the tenant. The parties settled for an agreement that no atomic experiments would take place on the property.

Belkin said the nature of the work changed dramatically after New York passed the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act in 2019.

“The change in law in 2019, which ripped away so many avenues of profit in rent-regulated housing, to a large extent, has caused buyouts and some primary residence cases and lots of other litigation to become much less prominent,” he said.

Since then, his work has focused much more on doing due diligence for buyers and sellers. That often means collecting all the documentation to show that a unit was legally deregulated, since overcharges present a liability.

“You really have to go through a legal proctological analysis in order to determine, what is it I am selling or what is it I am buying?” Belkin said.

Belkin has also spent much of his life living in regulated housing himself. He was born in the Bronx when his family lived in a rent controlled apartment. When he was 10 years old, the family moved into a Mitchell-Lama development in Coney Island. He moved into his wife’s rent-stabilized studio before the couple moved to a larger, still rent-stabilized apartment in Brooklyn.

He hopes to focus his retirement on seeing his daughters and grandchildren, and continuing drawing, sculpting and watercolor.