scaffolding building at 585 West End Avenue

also management says this will be up for "1 year", knowing their past record it will probably be 2 or 3 years

What's the Tenants Association doing? Scaffolding isn't enough to count as a reduction in services, and so get your stabilized rents lowered, but the TA should at least be keeping you informed and being an annoyance to the landlord.

The landlord's got three cases going against long-time tenants:

78893/2012
585 WEA REALTY LLC, vs SCHREIER, JEAN
83554/2012
585 W.E.A. REALTY, LLC vs GUTTMAN/GUTTMAN-BASS, JOSHUA/NAOMI
69266/2013
585 W.E.A.REALTY LLC, vs MARCHIANO, SAL

Every building at some time or another will have scaffolding. It's the law , it protects the residents/owners from danger of falling debris, it's temporary, and it's not the basis for a rent reduction.

management is trying to RAISE rents on leases. not sure how far they are going to get with that as an empty apartment with scaffolding over the windows is not going to rent well
Any smart renter would ask for a reduction as there's no way management can rent these units at their current price until the scaffolding comes down

and as to "temporary" the track record here is 8 years of scaffolding... don't think anyone would say that's temporary

Scaffolding my apple orchard.... That sucks.

It's OK, you have less than eight months to go on your lease, and then you'll be out and in a building you like better. (I'm going by your first post about this being four months ago.)

Meanwhile, more than half the apartments are stabilized, so the landlord's revenue won't go away entirely. Even for the market-rate apartments, the rents can be dropped to where people will be OK with no views, so it's not as if the building will be half-empty.

As a resident of this building I can attest to the fact that THIS current round of scaffolding has been up for 13 months and there has been no work done to the facade in weeks. So we wait and look though windows obscured by metal bars, netting and wood planks. Management refuses to establish or announce a completion date and many apartments have damage as a result of the work.

and the scaffolding is still covering the entire building… facade work nowhere near complete

well, look on the bright side.