Milford Street Captive Insurance unveils new legal claims analysis

Milford Street Captive Insurance has released a new analysis conducted by LegalClaimsAI and the NYU Furman Center of legal claims filed against residential rental properties in New York City, finding that the number of claims grew substantially between 2021 and 2023 and then remained constant at that elevated level. The analysis also finds that government-subsidised, income-restricted housing and heavily rent-stabilised buildings have consistently faced a disproportionately higher rate of claims per unit than market-rate and other housing types.

NYU's Furman Center and LegalClaimsAI matched a data set of 56,289 individual claims filed against New York City properties between 2021 and 2025. After matching, researchers analysed 21,992 claims filed against 18,745 unique residential rental buildings comprising 916,207 units. New York State has more than 1,100,000 active claims, making it the most litigious state in the union.

“Unchecked litigation is an existential threat to affordable housing,” said John A Crotty of the Milford Street Captive Insurance Company. “Across the board, these legal claims translate into higher insurance premiums that starves our rental housing stock of desperately needed resources. Not surprisingly, where government investment is the highest so is the rate of claims. New York City's Housing Preservation and Development's portfolio of subsidised and regulatory agreement properties, meaning New York's taxpayers, shoulder a disproportionate and unsustainable burden of the costs generated by these claims. This translates into fewer units, higher rents and a rapid and accelerating decline in housing quality.”

“Part of what is so exciting about the era we are in is about providing solutions that were previously unavailable,” said Keith Minella, CEO of LegalClaims.AI. “We are a disruptive technology that mines data embedded in court filings for a range of application that include public benefits, such as affordable housing and uncompensated care provided by hospitals. It is rewarding to see the results, and we hope they are helpful to policymakers in making more informed decisions.”

The total number of claims filed citywide grew by 29.6% from 2021 to 2022, and by another 29.2% from 2022 to 2023, before leveling off and declining slightly through 2025. On a per-unit basis, claims per 100,000 units grew 69.6% between 2021 and 2024 — from 128.69 to a high of 218.32 — before easing slightly to 200.3 in 2025.

Sorting buildings into eight categories — including market-rate, government-subsidised/income-restricted, mixed-income, public housing, Mitchell-Lama, and three tiers of legacy rent-stabilised housing — researchers found that government-subsidised, income-restricted buildings and buildings that are 90%+ rent-stabilised consistently had the highest number of claims per unit, outpacing market-rate housing and buildings with fewer rent-stabilised units throughout the study period.

The analysis also found variation by claim type. Premises claims outpaced other categories overall, and on a per-unit basis, affordable housing types — public housing, government-subsidised/income-restricted housing, and heavily rent-stabilised buildings — consistently had higher rates of premises claims than market-rate and mixed-income buildings. The most pronounced shift was in tort/negligence claims within government-subsidised, income-restricted housing, where the per-unit rate grew 61.82% from 2022 to 2023 and a further 57.48% from 2023 to 2024, off a smaller base.

Geographically, the Bronx and Brooklyn recorded the highest total number of claims, with the Bronx also posting the highest claims rate per unit — peaking at 253.42 claims per 100,000 units in 2024, compared to a peak of 151.7 per 100,000 units in Brooklyn. All five boroughs saw claim volumes rise sharply.

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