In January 2024, a woman named Carla Badami posted a TikTok from her Lower East Side apartment explaining how she'd just gotten her landlord to give her $6,000 back.
By February, four million people had watched it.
What made it land wasn't the money. It was that what Carla did was kind of boring. Her lease was almost up and her landlord hadn't sent a renewal. She got curious. She went to the DHCR website — the state agency that keeps rent histories on every rent-stabilized apartment in New York — and filled out a form for her own.
Five days later, the rent history showed up in her inbox.
Her landlord had been telling the state her legal rent was $1,295 a month. He'd been charging her $1,850. That's $555 a month, every month, for almost a year. She added it up. She called him. He didn't fight it. He cut her a check for $6,000 and gave her a new lease at the legal rate.
No court, no lawyer, no tenant rights org. She emailed a government website, waited five days, and got her rent back.
Her landlord cut her a check for $6,000 and gave her a new lease at the legal rate. He didn't fight the request.
The video went viral because almost nobody knew you could do that.
DHCR got flooded with requests in the weeks after. Reporters at THE CITY tracked the spike straight back to her TikTok. Tenant lawyers said the obvious thing, which is that millions of people in rent-stabilized apartments in New York could be doing the same thing she did, and almost none of them are.
About a million apartments in New York City are rent-stabilized — roughly 44% of all rentals. Most people in them don't know they are. The law caps how much rent can go up each year and entitles tenants to refunds if their landlord charges above the legal rate. If the overcharge was willful, the tenant can recover triple damages plus interest, which is probably why Carla's landlord cut her a check instead of fighting it. He'd have been on the hook for closer to $18,000.
There's a four-year statute of limitations on overcharge claims, by the way. Anything older than that is gone.
If your apartment is rent-stabilized, you can do exactly what she did. DHCR is at hcr.ny.gov. The form takes about five minutes. (And if you're not sure whether your apartment is stabilized, you're really not alone. There's an answer to that too.)
She got lucky her landlord folded fast, and luckier that her overcharge was the kind you can prove on a single piece of paper. Most people who watched her video and requested their own rent histories won't have that experience. DHCR is backlogged, and investigations take years. A lot of overcharges look messier on paper than hers did. Check anyway.
