Moscow on the Hudson
Tucker, William
good or ill, the wall dividing the Times from the church is lower than it once was. "If they want respectability," says editorial-page editor Cheshire, "I say they deserve it. I don't see any...
...Revenues are up by 51 percent in 1986 over 1985 levels, though from such a tiny base it's hard to call this rise significant...
...Everywhere else HPD hammered away at him, dragging him into court for trivial code violations, supporting tenants who refused to pay rent, and spreading the word he was a "specula-tor...
...Your big mistake was letting any of your tenants stay in the building at all," he told Robinson...
...It's cheap...
...I've been there about ten years...
...But I know an owner who's had it worse...
...I didn't have any answers...
...He was Jerry Oxford, a small, wiry mechanical engineer, about 45, with a threadbare tweed jacket and light-brown eyes...
...She told me her last name was Shabazz, but wouldn't give her first name...
...We don't pay taxes, you see...
...They've cleaned me out...
...His complaints were "the floorboards squeaked, the sink didn't drain right, and there were vermin in the apartment...
...No, we're here against the city...
...I've lost almost $100,000 in the last ten years...
...The paper still re-quires an annual subsidy of more than $30 million...
...limo of these tenants actually came to the trial and testified on Robinson's behalf, saying there had been adequate heat and hot water before the fire...
...I ain't got no money left...
...The five tenants I was interviewing were the last in the building...
...Robinson and his wife had saved $90,000 over their lifetime and put it all into the buildings...
...The New York Times Magazine, the Daily News Sunday magazine, New York magazine, and Long Island's Newsday have all turned it down...
...Then he moved to Harlem, where his troubles began...
...I heard you say your landlord was a Jew...
...How did you happen to acquire the building in the first place...
...Well, I just said it, that's all," she shot back...
...Who's going to take care of me...
...I'm afraid for my life" She finally told me her name was Catherine but said she didn't have a telephone...
...They are the only people who can be gulled into believing that free enterprise still exists in New York housing...
...I worked full time just to support the building and I still couldn't make it...
...I don't see any conservatives willing to put up that kind of money for a daily newspaper...
...We have sources, whoever is in," says West...
...So if we bought a place and had to start dealing with the government it would cost us too much money...
...We're supporting the landlord...
...It's just that it injects such an element of global politics into New York housing...
...Like all defendants, Robinson and his wife Dorothy, who is co-owner, had to answer a 10:30 a.m...
...The trouble is the big guys never show up," he said...
...That's how you build a newspaper...
...In person, though, he was more impressive...
...Her eyeglasses were thick as coke bottles...
...We're street vendors...
...Almost 80 percent own only one building and 45 percent own less than ten units...
...What sets Oxford at odds with New York is his profession—fixing up old buildings...
...She was about 30, rather nicely dressed in an African motif...
...Nor does the prospect of having its most influential reader leave his home on Pennsylvania Avenue, come 1989,seem to trouble de Borchgrave's guerrillas...
...We'll keep writing good copy, covering things the others won't, doing the good analysis and reporting," says executive editor Woody West...
...Wearing a powder-blue suit with matching pearl earrings and necklace, she was easily the most elegant woman in the courtroom...
...My husband and I make $30,000 a year...
...If it's not HPD, it's legal aid...
...Robinson was now making another appearance before Judge Friedman, always under the threat of being sent back to jail...
...The city itself owns 15 percent and the figure is still climbing...
...Alistair Cooke, William Shawn, editor of the New Yorker, and Whitney Ellsworth, publisher of the New York Review of Books, all live in rent-controlled apartments...
...Have you applied for a city loan...
...Well, we talked about it...
...They were savaged by the young attorney for the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), who charged they were not qualified to say what constituted "adequate" services...
...But the damned landlord won't fix a thing...
...I love the apartment...
...Shabazz was about to answer, but the bailiff called her case...
...What should be done with such people...
...It was brief...
...Judge Friedman told Robinson, who is black, that it made no difference—as long as people were in his building he was obligated to provide them with services...
...I'm the only one left on my block...
...Payments for this "legal bribery" often run from ten to twenty thousand dollars...
...Rents...
...This is the atmosphere which landed Elzie Robinson in jail...
...They've filled the building with drug addicts and prostitutes," the woman told me...
...They're trying to get him out of the building and they want me to say some things against him...
...The other magazines said it "wasn't quite right for them...
...I was gathering stories for a book I am writing on New York rent control...
...After a few minutes Steinberg and Friedman concluded that Robinson was making a diligent enough effort to remedy the situation and the case could be continued until June...
...bellicose...
...They're not paying any rent anymore, either," the lawyer told me...
...Every time you come down here the city attorneys are there supporting the tenants...
...If landlords don't show up in housing court, the case is almost always dismissed in favor of the tenants...
...A close friend of mine recently "acquired" an Upper West Side apartment by paying $7,000 in "key money" to the previous tenant...
...They never see the landlord, but they're told to send the check to one of those Lower East Side synagogues...
...Most of New York is nowowned by small landlords...
...We're bringing harassment charges against our landlord," a middle-aged man told me...
...All great newspapers," Mencken writes, "are ceaselessly querulous and...
...Every other building is in the hands of the city...
...Accoo is a tall black man with a thin mustache and natty attire...
...He hadn't seemed too persuasive in the court-room when I listened to the tapes of the March 3 trial...
...The worst-dressed people are usually the land-lords...
...All you see is these refugees from the `captive nations' trying to eke out a middle-class living from one small building...
...But no, things don't work that way...
...Why did she stay in the apartment then...
...Soon I was having nightmares that Robinson would die in jail before Icould tell anyone about it...
...Over 70 percent of Harlem is now owned by HPD...
...A big, robust man, painfully slowed by age, he still spends all day every day tending his eighty-four apartments...
...He says he can no longer deal with rent regulations...
...How do you know he isn't fronting for a Chinese...
...The "tenants" were actually squatters who moved into one of his buildings last December after it was damaged by fire...
...You know, I heard you say some-thing just a minute ago," she said...
...With those hands—twenty-five years...
...Yes, but I can't tell you my name...
...I asked...
...Meanwhile, large builders are bailing out left and right...
...In the politically supercharged precincts of Manhattan, however, the anti-landlord bias is palpable...
...Many of these elites sincerely believe that the exploitation of their own landlords somehow benefits the poor...
...The story seemed to epitomize the brutal warfare that New York City is currently carrying out against private landlords...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1986 21...
...He went to jail for six months...
...Yet I'm supposed to supply them with heat, hot water, pay insurance, you name it...
...You should have kicked them all out...
...Many Fortune 500 companies have left New York, stating that they can no longer find housing for transferred or new employees...
...I own a brownstone in Harlem," she said...
...She livedin East Harlem and paid $281 a month for six rooms...
...And actually, despite the talk, we just don't get that many leaks from the Administration...
...The "best deals" in New York are found on the Upper East and West Sides and in Greenwich Village, the centers of "old wealth" and glitTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1986 19 terati...
...It wasn't their synagogue that had been accused by the FBI, was it...
...Why would anyone have to launder rent money...
...Finally, about 4:30, the Robinsons were summoned...
...What's the problem...
...The News editor said she had been instructed to concentrate on "movie-star stuff...
...But here was a story, I thought, that would finally show people the fruitless savagery of New York City's housing policies...
...A vast number of New York tenants, I have found, are morally certain thattheir landlord has "great connections," or is part of some mysterious political cabal...
...The FBI just charged one of those Lower East Side synagogues with laundering money for organized crime...
...And that's what happened...
...If a tenant doesn't pay rent for a year—for five years—they still won't kick them out...
...The tenants don't show up and the judges just postpone the case...
...Circulation is rising by several hundred readers a week...
...As I stood outside later talking with the Robinsons and Accoo, Steinberg came rushing down the hall and ran straight into the group...
...The statistics, however, tell a different story...
...The Times is thin on both...
...When he was appointed to housing court in 1981, he had been on his own personal rent strike for six years...
...While the Robinsons were waiting to be called, they introduced me to an-other black Harlem landlord who they said had a story almost as bad as theirs...
...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1986 "I don't care, I just want to hear your story...
...We had a Jew lady in there who owned the building, and then she sold it to a Jew man...
...They don't pay you nothing...
...She called me twice, but I missed her both times...
...Oh, it's too complicated to explain to you now...
...She saw it wasn't a slum and told HPD to lay off...
...she asked, in the way you might ask someone how he happened to break an arm or a leg...
...He said he is constantly hounded by HPD, which seems to see small owners as its prime competitors for the city's real estate...
...They lived on the Upper East Side...
...The next person I met was another Harlem landlord named Mary Peter-son...
...We're not some sort of reactor to the Post," he says...
...I did see an article a week later...
...But when you buy a co-op, you've got to talk to banks and they want to look at your income and all that...
...What was shady about that...
...The money disappeared in five years and they are now broke...
...Most people buy newspapers to read about things like the mighty Boston Celtics—and the sports section of the Times ranks among AP's Top 10...
...Unfortunately, advertisers, in turn, place ads based on a paper's circulation...
...So what's going to happen if I lose my building...
...They go after me for everything I do...
...There are in fact whispersthat Moon's backers may slash the paper's budget and concentrate on the company's weekly magazine, Insight, which as a national publication wouldn't have to overcome the en-trenched local advertising monopoly faced by the Times...
...HPD, which ad-ministers these foreclosures, had already started moving in some of the city's homeless population...
...Steinberg smiled bravely...
...New immigrants, particularly East Europeans, form a significant part of the new ownership...
...calendar call to remain on the docket...
...Her building was being taken over by the city for back taxes...
...But what difference did that make...
...I asked...
...You'd think that this spectacular failure of municipal socialism would bring cries of outrage and a revolution for the free market...
...Naturally, it has produced the nation's worst housing shortage...
...I started talking to another woman whom I had heard respond as the tenant in another case...
...I spent several days in housing court over the past few months, following the Robinson case and interviewing tenants and landlords...
...It's terrible...
...People also buy newspapers to read and clip the ads...
...Private developers no longer even think of building rentals in New York...
...Are you a tenant...
...We're a newspaper...
...You come down to court here and try to collect and they don't do nothing for you...
...I asked in a way that probably didn't hide my annoyance...
...For $30,000 a year she could probably afford a co-op, or move to New Jersey, couldn't she...
...I swear if I were out dealing drugs on a street-corner the city would pay me less attention," he said...
...Speaking in favor of landlords in New York, of course, is like speaking on behalf of polio...
...Don't you read the papers...
...As a result, property ownership is falling into the hands of ever-more pathetic marginal investors...
...On March 3, 1986, New York City Housing Court Judge Lewis Friedman threw him in jail for twenty days for not providing adequate heat and hot water for people in his buildings...
...The editor at the Times called the story too "parochial" and said he thought he remembered hearing New York's 43-year-old rent-control issue had been "settled...
...Only moments before, a hysterical small owner had screamed at officials: "My parents walked away from a building in Warsaw in 1945 because the Communists drove them out and now the same thing is happening here...
...HPD, a vast, sprawling bureaucracy, funds organizations that sponsor rent strikes, takes over buildings for back taxes, and represents the tenants in housing court...
...What was she doing down here...
...Rent control in New York is a "temporary" measure first imposed during World War II and never lifted...
...Finding a decent apartment in New York involves the kind of clandestine dealings that most people identify with the Soviet economy...
...He pays $93.54 for a two-bedroom apartment...
...if the tenant doesn't show, the case is postponed...
...She had bright-pink cheeks and a coat that lifted her about a step-anda-half above a bag-lady...
...Oh, HPD asked me to come down and testify against my Jew landlord," she said...
...Any day...
...tist Church, Adam Clayton Powell's old ministry...
...It's all very shady...
...At this writing, however, he is alive and well, and you, dear Spectator readers, are the first to read the story...
...I'll call you tonight from a pay phone," she said...
...The landlord was fighting it...
...Once you conform with one regulation, you have to conform with them all...
...Lots of people I know," says Matthews, "read the paper just for the arts and sports...
...Well let me ask you something...
...Judge Jay Stuart Dankberg, universally regarded as the most blatantly pro-tenant of Manhattan's nine judges, occupies a rent-controlled apartment near fashionable Gramercy Park...
...When the fire partially destroyed one building in December they told eight long-term tenants they could stay rent-free in the unburnt portion of the building if they provided their own electric heaters...
...The best muckraking is generally done by the opposition, from the Post's coverage of Watergate to William Safire's chronicling of the confusions of Jimmy Carter...
...Sam LeFrak, who built 30,000 units of middle-income housing, has decamped to Jersey City...
...Editors at the Times that we talked to exude a quiet confidence...
...One could argue the paper would do better during a Democratic regime, or a centrist Republican one...
...While vacancy rates in Dallas and Houston approach 15-20 percent, New York has lost 300,000 units to abandonment over the past ten years—some of them in the most beautiful and durable housing ever built in America...
...In the "Outer Boroughs"—Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island—it probably functions as well as any system can that is inherently designed to exploit landlords...
...Well, keep trying...
...While private enterprise constructed 100,000 units in 1926 and 40,000 in 1940, no more than 10,000 units per year have been built since 1976...
...Often they don't speak English very well...
...This East European flavor has become so commonplace in the nation's cultural capital that it is difficult to convince the average New Yorkerthat the "housing crisis" is not a national phenomenon...
...A little better dressed—but certainly not sartorially splendid—are the tenants...
...Her hair was drawn back severely and her eyebrows were penciled blue...
...Another group of tenants was knotted in the halls...
...Come in prepared to show that you are either going to repair the building or sell it," said Judge Friedman...
...How close was she to losing her building...
...she said incredulously...
...All this is used to justify the tenants' own machinations in avoiding rent...
...Helmsley owned 3 percent of the market...
...What did he think of the debate...
...I said I hadn't read anything about it...
...They were bringing a legal challenge to halt the conversions, and at the same time angling for "buy-outs" from the landlord...
...De Borchgrave seems to relish the competition, yet the paper on the other side of town isn't an obsession...
...I haven't heard from her since...
...Elzie Robinson is an 85-year-old former janitor who owns four buildings in Harlem...
...The landlord was converting several apartments to professional uses, trying to escape from rent regulations altogether...
...It's difficult for any new paper to escape this vicious circle, but the Times is making workmanlike progress...
...But it might be more fun once it gets a shot at George Bush, Bill Bradley, Gary Hart, or Jack Kemp...
...I can't say anymore now...
...My parents walked away from a building in Warsaw in 1945 because the Communists drove them out, and now the same thing is happening here...
...The rest of the day was spent waiting to be called...
...The boiler had been destroyed...
...Mayor Koch himself has a great deal, paying only $351.60 for a large Greenwich Village one-bedroom that could easily rent for $1,500...
...They were swollen and arthritic...
...Why bring it up in the first place...
...Robinson served ten days of his sentence in March...
...At a recent housing-code hearing I did a brief interview with a neatly dressed law student who had just spoken in favor of rent controls...
...Peterson out of business...
...The difficulty is that while rent control produces losers, it also creates winners...
...Finally, one of the housing court judges, Judge Harriet George, came up to my building to see for herself...
...Mary Peterson, who had been listening nearby, finally strolled over and joined the conversation...
...After only a few hours it is easy to get the layout...
...Their attorney, a tall, well-dressed woman in her thirties, was earnestly giving them advice...
...Well, I suppose they have a perfect right to try to scruff out a petit-bourgeois existence," he said...
...Harry Helmsley, the city's largest private owner, is currently liquidating his stock...
...The people in suits and ties are the attorneys...
...Since then I haven't had quite as much trouble...
...Putting everything aside for a week, I tried to rush the story into print...
...He said he had already been turned down...
...What was the problem there...
...She told my wife she was still afraid for her life...
...He has managed to hang on to four buildings, but has lost eight...
...On Park Avenue the price can go as high as $100,000...
...They've driven out every landlord around...
...She gave me a knowing look...
...Together they form a tremendously powerful constituency for maintaining rent control—and making sure it never gets discussed rationally...
...I asked her...
...Every third fingernail was a gnarled lump of discolored tissue...
...As a result, a broad swathe of New York's educated, upper-middle class has risen to levels of remarkable affluence without ever having to pay its own way...
...We're not poor people, you know...
...Forced to defend some-thing, they will accomplish the task by turning around and attacking some-thing else...
...New York City's Housing Court was established in 1972 in order to "resolve disputes between landlords and ten-ants...
...That's how he got the building," said Accoo...
...I had introduced myself to her before and she now realized that I was covering the Robin-sons' case...
...He began in his home neighborhood in Queens, buying up small, dilapidated buildings, rehabilitating them, and selling them to new owners, often arranging mortgages and paying the closing costs himself...
...They've been trying to put me in jail for four years now," he said...
...One building he bought was already "owned" by the Columbia Tenants' Union, a collection of old sixties radicals who specialize in rent strikes...
...William Tucker MOSCOW ON THE HUDSON What would Mia Farrow do without rent control...
...she cheerfully asked Elzie...
...Well, what difference does it make...
...I'm supposed to sup-port them...
...And then half of them don't pay anyway...
...She disappeared into the courtroom, where the City of New York would be using her testimony to put more people like Mrs...
...Or an Arab...
...Robinson raised his hands...
...She was black, about 45, dressed in tight-fitting jeans and stiletto heels...
...Others have simply closed up shop...
...Finally her curiosity overcame her...
...Four of my tenants pay me less than a hundred dollars...
...Most of these tend to be concentrated among the up-per classes...
...In fact, they have little to do with who gets "more scoops," though these build the paper's standing among elites...
...They reportedly charge 40-60 percent of the withheld rent as a fee...
...He's trying to drive us out of the building...
...Trying to get both sides of the issue, I started looking for tenants...
...Mayor Koch himself has a great deal, paying only $351.60 for a large Greenwich Village one-bedroom that could easily rent for $1,500...
...The HPD attorney, Carol Steinberg, moved easily behind the bar, laughing and joking with Judge Friedman...
...Show her your hands, Elzie," said Accoo, who was standing next to him...
...I stumbled onto Elzie Robinson's story last March while attending a meeting of the Harlem Taxpayers and Property Owners' Association in the recreation room of the Abyssinia BapWilliam Tucker is The American Spectator's New York correspondent...
...Happily for the Washington Times, the things most people read newspapers for have little to do with the religion of some of the editors...
...The Times only pretends to live in New York...
...They buy papers to read about movies, arts, fashion, and the Times has recruited some of the best writers around: culturologists Richard Grenier and John Podhoretz, media critic Don Kowet, arts critic Jane Addams Allen, featurist Diana West, and gag writer S. J. Masty...
...The Times has become a fun paper under Ronald Reagan...
...While newcomers to Manhattan are paying $1,000 for a dreary studio and $1,500 for a one-bedroom apartment with a view of a brick wall, people like Mia Farrow and State Senate minority leader Manfred Ohrenstein, an outspoken supporter of rent control, pay less than $1,800 for ten rooms overlooking Central Park...
...I was wrong...
...One gray-haired woman said something about tenants and I followed her down the hall...
...I asked the law student...
...They're the ones who make money out of the system...
...Tenants who have held out against block-sized developments have received payments as high as a half million dollars...
...Then his attorney, Ralph Accoo, was able to win a stay...
...He is currently writing a book on rent control for the Cato and Manhattan Institutes...
...Shabazz, knowing she was being called down, didn't flinch...
...Are you here against your landlord...
...The city wants to help you, you know...
...The Robinsons had acquired their buildings from his late employer, a Harlem landlord, whose family was liquidating the estate...
...Commercial and professional spaces are not regulated in New York, but there is constant agitation that they should be...
...While cities like Philadelphia and Chicago deal with normal housing vacancy rates of 6-9 percent, New York's stands at 2 percent and is estimated at minus 2 percent in mid-Manhattan (meaning that 2 per-cent is living in illegal housing...
...He never saw the inside of the building...
Vol. 19 • July 1986 • No. 7
