Socialist-minded legislators in Albany won’t quit until they bankrupt every apartment-building landlord in New York City — and make the housing crisis worse.
A bill now in the legislature, thinly disguised as an eviction-prevention measure, will go into effect rent control First time on market rate buildings.
Reversing a generations-old policy would drive small, immigrant and minority-group landlords out of business and leave their buildings at the mercy of well-heeled real estate companies hoping to demolish them for new construction. Are.
“This bill is universal rent control,” warned Sharon Redhead, whose family immigrated from Grenada in the Caribbean and owns five small buildings in Brownsville and East Flatbush, Brooklyn. “The sponsors don’t believe in free enterprise.”
“If this bill passes, a lot of small housing providers will have to sell,” said Cynthia Brooks, who owns a two-story, four-family brick house at 2181 Straus Street in Brownsville.
“You have to be in control of your building,” she said, but she’s not sure that’s possible if the law prevents her from charging enough rent to run the building. “My name is on the deed, but am I the real owner or not?”
Owners were already reeling from the deceptively named Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019, which put serious limits on their rights to raise rents to pay for repairs in the Big Apple’s 2.4 million rent-stabilized and rent-controlled units. formally curbed.
That jolt of wake-up rendered many apartments unlivable, and left many more vacant.
By 2021, the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development projects approximately 43,000 vacant rent-stabilized units.
Of those, 29,000 were “under or awaiting renewal”. But an unknown number of the remaining 14,000 were believed to be frozen because landlords could not fix them because of rent-hike limits imposed by the 2019 law.
Next equally bogus-named in the state assembly and state senate good cause eviction Bill. Nothing to do with evictions, it’s a Trojan horse to impose rent control on the city’s 1.4 million market-rate apartments for the first time.
The abominable bill would increase rents on market-rate units by 3% of the Consumer Price Index or 1.5%, whichever is higher.
Tenants could challenge even those small increases in the notoriously landlord-hated Housing Court.
Meanwhile the challenges of the landlords will not go anywhere. The state has full legal authority, under New York’s constitution, to regulate housing, including market-rate apartments.
Until now, only rent-stabilized and rent-controlled apartments in New York state — most of them in the Big Apple — have been subject to rent increase limits.
A coalition called Homeowners for an Affordable New York, which includes the Real Estate Board of New York and landlord-advocacy groups, calls the bill “an ideologically driven pursuit by far-left socialists” to address housing supply shortages. And in fact, it will be more difficult and impossibly expensive for new tenants to find an apartment.
Under current law, a landlord can decline to renew a lease with 30-90 days’ advance notice. But the GCE requires them to offer new leases when the old leases expire, regardless of any circumstances, such as whether the tenant posed a danger to neighbors.
“Bill’s name is a misnomer,” said the redheaded Brooklyn landlord. “A lease termination is not an eviction, but simply the end of a contract.”
Among several more devastating provisions, the GCE will end the long-allowed legal conversion of some vacant, stable apartments to market-rate rent.
This will reduce the rent increase that landlords can apply for if they have made improvements from 6% to 2% for the benefit of tenants.
Say hello to more broken boilers and faulty wiring!
Jan Lee, a third-generation Chinatown property owner who owns Mott Street, told the Post: “The people behind GCE are not interested in knowing about the other side of the balance sheet – such as real estate tax and Insurance.”
Redhead agreed. “The biggest driver of rent growth is property taxes,” she said. “Our taxes have increased to pay for the 30% pay raise for legislators.”
Her apartments include both stable and market-rate units.
“We rent below market when we can,” said Redhead. “But when the city increases my property taxes by 75% over two years, we have to raise the rent.”
Valentina Gojkaj, whose Albanian family immigrated to the US from the former Yugoslavia, owns two small buildings in the North Bronx and said the bill would hurt her.
The rent for her eight-unit property at 2526 Holland Avenue in the Allerton neighborhood is about $130,000 a year. His real estate taxes are over $60,000. And Gojkaj’s other costs are skyrocketing.
He said heating oil was $1.10 a gallon in 2020. It climbed to $6 over the winter. Gojkaj buys 9,000 gallons a year.
“With the ridiculous way the city assesses taxes,” the building is “underwater” — the term for properties where debt and/or operating costs exceed income — she told the Post.
GCE has enough backing to shake up the real estate industry. City Hall must be shuddering, too, because property-related taxes pump more dough into city coffers than Wall Street.
The bill has 54 co-sponsors in the 150-member state assembly and 22 co-sponsors in the 63-member state senate. The Assembly sponsor is Pamela Hunter (D-Syracuse) and the Senate sponsor is self-proclaimed “Democratic Socialist” Julia Salazar (D-Brooklyn).
Left-wing Legal Aid Societies and socialist-oriented organizations refer to this measure as “priority”.
They are opposed by a determined coalition called Homeowners for an Affordable New York, which includes the Real Estate Board of New York and landlord-advocacy groups that understand what’s at stake.
Although Gov. Cathy Hochul Hasn’t supported the bill – at least not yet — A well-traveled Albany insider sneered, “The Left humiliated her by rejecting her Court of Appeals choice for top judge [Hector LaSalle], Now it’s itching to stack them. If she bows out to GCE, it will make her their obedient dog forever.