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On December 5, New York State Senator Joseph
Bruno, leader of the State Senate's Republican
majority, announced his threat to
single-hand-edly block renewal of New York
State's rent regulations--i.e., the laws that
have kept rents affordable for millions of state
residents, particularly in New York City, when
they come up for re-newal this June. Bruno told
the Rent Stabilization Association (the
Orwellian name of a landlord interest group)
that he would use his influence in the state
Senate to prevent a vote extending the
fifty-year-old laws for another two years.
Because only 60,000 of the approxi-mately
one million New York State resi-dents who
benefit from legal limits on their rent live
outside New York City, Bruno, who comes from far
upstate Rensselaer County, has no right to talk
about this life-and-death issue. Joe Bruno is a
dead-moose-on-the-wall up-state Republican; his
constituents are white people who fled New York
City, or jail guards paid to lock up the sons of
NYC. Joseph Bruno and his legisla-tive cohorts
represent an alien force that hates us and would
like to see us all rot in hell. Kill all the
people and sell all the property!--that is their
motto. Getting rid of rent regulations, like
get-ting rid of welfare, is a good way to take
out the trash. Furthermore, the pols are getting
paid to take out the trash: three major landlord
groups have made $700,000 in campaign
con-tributions to New York State legisla-tors;
the politicians have received countless more
from individual land-lords.
Rent regulations, often taking the form of
rent freezes, have existed on and off in New
York City since World War I and continuously
since 1947. From that year until the late 1960s,
vir-tually all buildings in which six or more
apartments were rented to the public were
covered by rent control. The old version of the
law amounted to a near moratorium on rent
increases. The 1950s are often pointed to
(particularly by conservatives) as golden years
for New York City, with high employment and a
low crime rate. However, under-lying this era of
stability and traditional values was a strict
system that preserved communities by preventing
sudden hikes in rent. Rent regulation was greatly
weakened in 1969 when Rockefeller Republicans in the
legisla-ture decreed a two-tiered system in
which tenants already occupying their apartments
would continue under rent control--whereas those
moving into their apartments after 1969 would be
subject to a system called "rent
stabili-zation," which would give landlords
regular but still limited increases. Under rent
stabilization, the average rent on a New York
City apartment has approximately tripled over
the past twenty years, whereas the average rent
on a decontrolled apartment has approximately
sextupled.
Also over the past twenty years, millions of
apartments have fallen through the cracks in the
rent regula-tions and have become
"decontrolled." Buildings have been converted
into co-operatives, in which the owner of an
apartment is entitled to rent it out for as much
as the market will bear. Apartments and whole
buildings have been renovated by landlords, who
have then been permitted to raise the rents to
the market level under a something called "Major
Capital Improvements." Old residency hotels have
been converted to cooperatives or replaced by
fancy apartment build-ings exempt from rent
regulations--in other words, a substantial
number of apartments are now bringing in
mega-profits for property owners. Middle class
residents of Manhattan pay $1,000 a month or
more for a tiny stu-dio and $3,000 or more for
anything big enough to house a family. The
cheapest apartments on the fringes of Queens
seldom rent for less than half this much. When
you consider that a minimum wage job in New York
City pays $5.25 per hour, or $210 per 40-hour
week, it is easy to see how a lot of people
would not be able to live where they live, or
anywhere else in the city, without rent
regulations.
Landlord advocates speak of rent regulation as
if it were some hor-rendous violation of their
rights under the free enterprise system, but in
fact they are no more so than regulations on interest.
Limits on rent, like limits on interest, are measures
intended to contain the human costs of monopoly. When a
small number of people con-trol a commodity that
is in limited sup-ply and which a great many
people need, this minority can do great da-mage
to society. Banks are in such a position because
they control vast sums of money that people must
bor-row from them to keep their busi-nesses
going. Landlords are also in such a position
because they control space that people need to
live and produce.
Human beings in a civilized society need
money to live and produce, but perhaps more
fundamentally they need a place in which to do
it. In a city like New York, space is a
particularly scarce commodity and vast stretches
of land and multitudes of buildings are owned by
limited numbers of people. In the absence of
rent regulations, these few people will take
advantage of their monopolies to drive the price
of space up. Because there are many people
competing for space in New York City but few
people who own it, there is little competition
among the owners to force them to keep their
prices down. Therefore, in a place like New
York, rent regulation is the only way to
maintain stable communities--just as regulation
of interest rates has been the only way to
maintain a stable economy.
There is a largely unchallenged myth in NYC,
believed by many ten-ants who pay high rents,
that they are paying $1000 a month for their
little apartments because their next-door
neighbor pays only $400. Where is the proof for
this? The landlords don't want to get rid of
rent regulations be-cause they want to make
things fair, but because they want to make
them-selves rich. If rent regulations are
abolished, everyone will be paying a thousand
dollars a month! A common myth that we hear over
and over again is that building owners "have to
charge" newcomers to New York exor-bitant rents
because the old tenants are getting a cheap ride
under the rent laws. This is probably the most
widely accepted unproven assumption in New York,
and rent-poor citizens looking for a scapegoat
are too often ready to accept it. But think for
a moment: with the worldwide demand for space in
Manhattan, how can anyone say that landlords
will not raise everybody's rent through the
skylight if the rent regulations are not
retained? Is there any tenant who believes that
it is unfair for me to pay $400 per month for
the same apartment that he or she is pay-ing
$1200 per month for, but that it will somehow
be fair when we are both paying $1200 per month?
The tenants of New York, the major-ity, are
now in the same situation that Lower East Side
squatters faced alone just weeks ago. The big
daddies of government are lined up against the
majority now. Having tested their law-yers and
tanks against the squatters, they are now
training them on the rest of us.
We cannot let these Albany bas-tards get
away with what they want to do to us. We cannot
depend on the Democrats. We cannot depend on
Sheldon Silver, lily-livered Speaker of the
State Assembly and Assemblyman from part of the
Lower East Side. Sil-ver was already waffling
just hours af-ter Bruno's declaration of war on
rent regulations. He told the New York Times on
December 6: "I think that in the course of the
next six months, there's a lot of give and
take." Silver is already giving, and Bruno is
already taking--giving and taking our homes away
from us, that is. State Senator Martin Connor,
the Senate Democratic leader and State Senator
from a big gerry-mandered swath of the Lower
East Side, sent his "What Lies Ahead for New
York" letter to his constituents this xmas
without a word about pre-serving the rent
regulations. These politicians must be swept
into the gar-bage can of history by a popular
insur-gency. An intransigent people must ride
Sheldon Silver, Martin Connor, and city
councilman/landlord puppet Antonio Pag‡n out to
the East River on a rail. We must tar and
feather them, roll them into a tight sticky ball
with the landlord scum who make our lives
miserable, and hang them by their heels like
Mussolini! Let's fight to keep rent regulations
because they keep New York what it has always
been--our home!
****
....
Some of the hardest jobs in New York--cab
driving and restaurant work--pay less than ten
dollars an hour. Other essential jobs,
substitute teaching, for instance, are unstable
and pay little by the week. Even people who
qualify as yuppies go through periods of
unemployment where the maximum that they take in
is $300 per week. We are not talking about
alcoholics, drug addicts, or the mentally ill
here, but about the working people who stoke the
very fires of our city and for whom limitations
on rent are a matter of life and death.
....
If lenders of money were not regulated by law,
they could raise interest rates sky high--if the
demand for loans were high enough, they could
effectively ruin the economy by cutting off
whole layers of business from the funds that
they need. Regulation of the amount of interest
people can be charged when they borrow money is
a tradition that goes way back in human history.
To this very day, the Islamic world does not
allow interest to be charged on borrowed money
at all. During the Middle Ages, the Catholic
Church prohibited the extraction of interest.
Throughout the modern world, interest ceilings
are set by the government--in the U.S. this is
done by the states based on a prime rate set by
the Federal Reserve. Indeed, lending money at a
rate higher than that decreed by law is a
criminal offense called usury, which is
punishable by prison sentences and large fines.
....
Rent regulations are needed to keep down
rent usury--i.e., the charging of rents so
exorbitant as to deprive people of their places
within the community. True, rent usury has been
going on in New York for a long time--in fact,
it has already done incredible, irreparable
damage to the city. It has driven thousands of
small grocery store owners, whose rents were
never regulated, out of business. It has caused
all of New York's cheap hotels to disappear,
dumping those least able to afford high rents
into the street. Only the rent regulations have
kept a certain substantial fraction ofthe
population out of the clutches of rent usury.
The two and a half million of us who are covered
by rent regulations are the familiar faces that
you see in the neighborhoods of Manhattan,
Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens. We are the
people who have lived here for a long time
because Chelsea, or Harlem, or the Lower East
Side are part of our identity.
....
Think of what would happen to New York if
they got rid of rent regulations. The most
interesting and creative people will have to
leave. All of New York's community of
actor-waiters will have to go. Fifty-year-old
gay people in the Village--out! Puerto Ricans on
Delancy Street--out! Lower East Side
artists--out! Most of the black people in
Harlem...you get the picture. New York, and
particularly Manhattan,without rent regulations
will be a city composed only of people with
$1,000+ a month rent hanging over their heads,
who are tired, scared of losing their jobs, and
leading lives of quiet desperation. The city
will become a suburb like the rest of New York
State. New York will lose its charm; it will
become boring and lose its attraction even for
high-income residents, creating a high turnover
rate and the loss of community. Then, the real
estate dealers will just demolish the place and
build the poured glass and concrete Emerald City
that they dream of each night. The Lower East
Side and Hell's Kitchen and Harlem will be
memories like the African Burial Ground.
[ADD: In landlords'and gov't's interest to
maintain transiency and eliminate close
community ties: no tenant organizing or
organizing around social or political issues;
those with less money are forced out as
wealthier tenants are lured in.]
[AND: The counter-cultural scene made possible
by low and affordable rents and living attract
more monied renters who in turn attract real
estate speculators who seek more ways to milk
the buildings and neighborhoods for more profits
at the expense of the very counter-cultural
scene that made their real estate investment so
attractive and viable.]
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