Kicking the middle class

On a recent trip to my local coffee shop, I had an unexpectedly long wait for my chai. The reason: The woman ahead of me on line was bawling, gasping out her story to the sympathetic barista. She’d just been told, she sobbed, that her landlord was unexpectedly raising her rent, and she and her family were being evicted. The woman behind me chimed in: The exact same thing had happened to her a few months ago, she said.

This wasn’t just a case of greedy landlords looking to cash in on rising rents — that’s so 2007 — but rather of a 16-year-old provision in the rent regulations dubbed “luxury decontrol.” Back in the ’90s, some deep thinkers theorized that the reason no one could find an affordable apartment in New York was because the rich were hogging all the good places, paying rent-controlled prices for multibedroom palaces on Central Park West. The solution: Any apartment where the legal rent exceeded $2,000, and had tenants earning more than $175,000 a year — or was vacant — would be exempt from rent regulations. 

 This rule, which was supposed to unleash the magic of the market to create more affordable housing, worked out about as well as freeing Wall Street from nasty regulations: The city is now littered with empty “luxury condos,” while the Center for an Urban Future recently reported that only one apartment in ten is affordable to an average New Yorker. Meanwhile, none of the bright lights in Albany thought to have the “luxury” cap rise with inflation. As a result, it’s been hitting more and more people in recent years, even families earning less than $175,000: “If the legal rent is $2,000, the owner has a huge incentive to make it become vacant, including threats or harassment,” says Maggie Russell, director of the advocacy group Tenants and Neighbors.  

Russell and other housing activists are headed to Albany tomorrow, to push for a bill by assembly-woman Linda Rosenthal that would eliminate rent hikes on vacancy, and raise the cap to  $2,700 a month. It’s too late to help those uprooted people at my coffee shop, but better 16 years late than never.

is a Brooklyn-based journalist and author. He can be contacted at demause.net and fieldofschemes.com.