Thank you everyone for replies! Very helpful.
To address some questions:
Yes, the owners are absolutely shady. PM me if you want to know who they are (hint: they are large enough to their own wikipedia entry). Quite frankly, however, I have yet to hear of a non-shady developer in the city.
We have no interest in becoming a landlord. We are interested in living in the area for the next 20 years and want to reduce our monthly burn rate from rent. Our rent has gotten to the point where NYT rent vs buy calculator has moved towards buy. We are not necessarily interested in actively managing the apartment money either (in fact our jobs explicitly prohibit this). And no, unfortunately even passive management like Betterment and Wealthfront is not an option. We can buy some ETFs (if approved, does not always happen). We can buy some mutual funds. Not particularly attractive. We cannot buy options, or short, or participate in IPO or a laundry list of other exclusions. We are only allowed a handful of transactions a year.
Re rent stabilization -- my grasp of the law is tentative, but the building receives active tax abatement (it is an 80/20 building). I believe while the abatement is in place, the stabilization, which applies even to expensive units, remains in place. At this point it is mostly academic, tbh. The legal rent is definitely not attractive ($3800/month for un-renovated 1br). Our current rent is slightly under market at $3200/month.
Someone has brought up a good point -- what am I hoping to find out by posting here. Here are more concrete questions:
1. How do you value an apartment inside a building if pieces of information are missing (e.g. the state of the furnace, for example). In a private house I'd have hired an inspector. I had hoped other tenants would have organized and hired someone by now (its been 1.5 months since red herring has arrived), but no dice.
2. This is pretty specific -- if someone has looked into land leased building purchases (esp. in NYC), how does one find out the terms of a specific land lease. This information is not in the offering plan.
3. Stories/anecdotes of living through non-eviction conversion. Almost all buildings in the area evicted tenants before conversions; in place conversions are rare.
In general, we are pretty tame in our investments; however we do need a place to live (and want to stay in school zone, which is small). Sounds like the devil is entirely in the details and we might need to pay a lawyer just to understand the offering plan.