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The City Council speaker is introducing a raft of bills on Wednesday aimed at stopping landlords from harassing rent-regulated tenants to force them out of their apartments.

The speaker, Corey Johnson, said the package of 18 bills is intended to close loopholes and address abusive practices identified in The New York Times’s recent series, “Unsheltered,” which showed how some large landlords exploit New York’s fragmented regulatory system to push apartments out of regulation.

“It seems like landlords and developers come first,” said Mr. Johnson, a Manhattan Democrat. “For tenants, it doesn’t seem even like they are an afterthought. They are not a thought at all.”

With Mr. Johnson behind them, the bills have a good chance of passage in the Democrat-controlled Council. Still, the legislation is likely to face stiff opposition from New York’s real estate industry, and it was not immediately clear whether the bills would have the full support of Mayor Bill de Blasio.