Actually, they have stopped offering tenants money to move out unless they get a crop of tenants who know their rights and have some kind of leverage to enforce them (these are usually more affluent tenants who hung onto stabilized lease who band together). Instead, they silently declare war on existing tenants by demolishing their homes while they live in them. Then, tenants who understand this to be classic slum lord harassment begin the assembly of an endless paper trail to get them to pay them to leave. By the time tenants get landlords to pay, the money offered is a piddling sum which covers only property damage and health care costs of tenants they have made sick or injured with dangerous, dust-filled construction air, and falling bricks from their ceilings. They break tenants down until the tenant will take a few thousand bucks just to get to leave and not be charged for the remaining months on their leases. I know this because these practices swept my and my friends' Brooklyn neighborhoods absolutely clean of long-term renters beginning about seven years ago. Another key development signaling that this problem is rampant is the fact that De Blasio has instituted a new initiative to punish landlords for harassing tenants in this and other ways because it had become such an epidemic. Unfortunately, the problem is so widespread that only the absolute worst of the worst are punished for treating tenants like this.
But treating tenants like this at every level of the NYC market is really just part of the codified MDL landlord playbook in NYC. It isn't just for slum lords anymore. Market rate rental tenants are harassed, asked to provide 6 months' security (often not returned) and the landlords make no repairs until they are taken to court. This used to be the domain of the slum lords and a few ultra-shady landlords. These days, you can't pay for a rental unit and a landlord who offers a product you signed-up to pay for. (this basically applies to landlords under the MDL, not rich people who rent out a floor of their brownstone- they are not "career landlords") As a tenant, you need to keep filing HP actions in Housing Court in order to get basic services like heat and hot water, even in so-called "luxury" buildings. In this climate of unaffordable "luxury" rentals that are run like slums by the landlords (but look "nice" to a casual observer) a tenant's only option in many cases is to find a way to double up with a friend or to leave the city and Airbnb when they can. The tenant protection laws that are constantly trumpeted are only as good as the mechanism to enforce them, and while the city pays lip service to the idea of protecting tenants from harassment, injury, or swindle, their interest is really with the landlord. Housing court doesn't offer solutions to major tenant problems beyond what is listed in "The Warranty of Habitability". If a tenant wants the parking space they paid for so they can have a car to get to work while they live out in the boonies 1.5 hour commute on congested and failing public transport, they will have to put down a $20,000 retainer to have that case tried in Supreme Court. Housing court doesn't handle such matters.
edited to: make a distinction between landlords who own large buildings and the wealthy folks who make extra money by renting out an unused floor of their brownstone. I'm speaking about the former here.