Illegal deregulation?

Landlords can deregulate the apartment by adding the cost of renovation improvements to the rent until it reaches the deregulation threshold of $2000 once it is vacated. The only person that can shed light on this issue is your landlord.

Landlords can increase rents by 18.25% for one-yr leases and 20% for two-yr leases after a vacancy on top of adding 1/40th of the cost of any renovation or major capital improvement to the monthly rent. Once the rent reaches

http://www.mcadamslaw.net/rentovercharges.html

While this tenant attorney is prominent in the field, I've heard no feedback about him.

Have you been in the apartment since 2008?? It would be pretty hard to get to $2,000 from $780. In addition to the 20% increase, the landlord could collect about a .5% increase for each year of the prior tenant's 21-year tenancy, so closer to 35% total. Still, that would require a $40,000 renovation to get to $2,000. Try this calculator

http://www.nycrgb.org/html/guidelines/vac_calc/vaccalc08.html