Tenants packed a Queens hall on Friday for the first in a series of Rent Guidelines Board pubic hearings, waving placards calling for rent cuts, or at the very least another rent freeze, for rent-stabilized apartments.
Expect more of the same when the hearings move to Brooklyn Monday night.
With full mayoral control over the rent board (all nine board members are Mayor de Blasio appointees) and a mayor desperate to pull up his approval rating, it’s looking like the board will, in its June 27 final vote, approve a historic second-consecutive rent freeze.
That would spell disaster for landlords and tenants alike.
The board set the stage when it took a preliminary vote last month, proposing a rent increase within the range of 0 percent to 2 percent on one-year leases.
Last June, when the board enacted an unprecedented rent freeze for tenants of 1 million rent-stabilized apartments in the city, de Blasio claimed the board acted independently of City Hall.
But months later, he rolled out a taxpayer-funded $1 million ad campaign taking full credit for the rent freeze. Not coincidentally, his ads are back on the air.
Since taking office in 2014, de Blasio has made the rent-guidelines process part of his affordable-housing obsession. But that has never been the board’s mission.
While some costs (like heating oil) can vary wildly from year to year, the majority of building-operating costs — real-estate taxes, water and sewer charges, labor — rise annually and never come down.
In 2014 and 2015, de Blasio increased property-tax assessments by 21.6 percent and water and sewer rates by 6.32 percent. Yet, the rent board enacted a 1 percent rent increase over that same period — far less than landlords would need to pay for the city-imposed tax hikes.
If de Blasio is going to deny rent increases that landlords need to pay for these city-imposed tax increases, then City Hall should freeze property taxes and water rates, too.
Being denied fair rent increases places landlords in the precarious position of either paying their property taxes or cutting back on improvements and delaying repairs. Of all people, de Blasio should know that.
That’s because last year, as Mayor de Blasio was freezing the revenue of rent-stabilized apartment owners, Landlord de Blasio told City and State he had to raise the rents of his tenants by 3 percent to cover repairs and operating expenses of the two private houses he owns in Brooklyn (for which he collects over $100,000 in rent).
With the majority of rent-regulated, affordable housing built 75 years ago, owners collectively invest hundreds of millions of dollars annually in improvements, repairs and maintenance necessitated by an aging housing stock.
Inadequate rent increases has a domino effect on tens of thousands of New Yorkers. Work dries up for neighborhood contractors and businesses, local residents lose good-paying jobs, mom-and-pop retail stores lose business and affordable housing deteriorates.
The truth is, the real housing issue is not affordability, but rather low incomes. This was substantiated at Friday’s hearing, at which virtually every tenant testified that it was becoming too expensive to live in the city on their incomes.
Freezing or holding down rents provides no significant relief to low-income households and erodes affordable housing. The rent burden on low-income tenants can, however, be eased by rent subsidies like the proposed legislation in the state Senate supported by both sides of the aisle.
The Senate unanimously passed a bill this year that would provide an income-based, permanent rent freeze modeled after the senior-citizen and disability rent-increase-exemption programs. It would provide permanent relief to nearly 220,000 households that pay 50 percent or more of their annual income for rent.
Why hasn’t de Blasio supported this bill? Could it be because it puts sound housing policy ahead of his politics?
Joseph Strasburg is president of the Rent Stabilization Association, which represents 25,000 owners of the city’s 1 million rent-stabilized apartments.