The Rent-Control wars
TUCKER, WILLIAM
The Rent-Control Wars by William Tucker On April 11 in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., someone started a fire in the building that houses the offices of New York State Senate majority leader Joseph Bruno....
...William Tucker is a writer living in Brooklyn...
...in 1965, more than 250 of the Fortune 500 had their corporate headquarters in New York City...
...In December, Bruno announced he wanted a two-year phase-out of rent regulations with exemptions only for the poor, the elderly, and the handicapped...
...But at least the direction is clear...
...In California, the state courts finally intervened in 1992 and ordered a one-time, 33 percent rent increase on all controlled apartments in Berkeley, which had one of the most draconic rent-control ordinances in the nation...
...Today the figure is 46...
...Right now, Joe Bruno, the man some New Yorker is trying to set on fire, is the best friend that New Yorker has...
...As head of a six-seat Republican majority, he can simply allow the rent laws to expire on June 15...
...People would put their furniture in storage for summer vacation and rent a new apartment when they returned in the fall...
...The city government now spends more money to warehouse the empty buildings it has taken for taxes than it contributes to the New York Public Library...
...Yet in the entire listings there were only 12 apartments for under $600, all of them single-room studios...
...All this has taken a spectacular toll on the city's economy...
...The strategic response of New York's real estate industry has been dismal...
...Bruno is under literal attack for having the courage to challenge America's most famous experiment with socialism—New York City rent control...
...Bruno is in a strong position to make this demand...
...The initiative won by a 51-49 percent margin...
...Census figures, is $600...
...Frankly, we're a little surprised at how smoothly everything has gone," says Pat Canavan, the Boston mayor's special adviser on housing...
...On Sunday, April 6, the Times listed more than 2,000 apartments for rent in all five boroughs...
...This inbred housing market eventually bled New York dry...
...This is the same method Boston used to shed rent control after 25 years...
...So far, Democratic Assembly leader Sheldon Silver has said he will settle for nothing less than a permanent extension of rent regulations...
...The process may take 20 years, and San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Monica, and Berkeley still suffer severe housing shortages due to rent control...
...But with a vaguely sympathetic George Pataki in the governor's mansion, Bruno stands a strong chance of carrying through his threat...
...A shaken Bruno— already under armed guard because of death threats— vowed he would not be intimidated...
...In 1994, property owners in Massachu-setts's three rent-controlled cities—Boston, Cambridge, and Brookline—gathered 70,000 signatures to put a constitutional amendment banning rent control on the state ballot...
...Finding a reasonable apartment meant moving to the end of a long queue that stretched out five years and beyond, and it was much easier to move the national headquarters to Dallas...
...During the 1920s and early '30s, developers put up more than 50,000 units a year...
...Even people who finally luck into their "great deal" become "Slaves of New York," because (as Tama Janowitz explained in the book of the same name) once they've landed an apartment, they know they can never move again...
...Just peruse the apartment listings in the New York Times...
...Each August the papers carried stories of landlords' sprucing up their buildings for the "fall renting season...
...There are plenty of things to be done in New York, but none will make much difference until the city gets rid of rent control...
...A few hours after it was extinguished, someone started another...
...One of the major reasons corporations left town is that they found it impossible to house new employees...
...Developers could probably tip the scales right now by pledging to build 20,000 new housing units a year the minute deregulation takes place...
...All this is happening at an opportune moment, with rent control in retreat almost everywhere across the country...
...The California legislature has since adopted statewide vacancy decontrol, which frees apartments from regulation as they become vacant...
...The sad truth is that almost no one in New York— tenants, landlords, or developers—has any collective memory of what it is like to live in a free housing market...
...What have 50 years of rent regulations done to New York City's housing market...
...Fifty years later, New Yorkers sincerely believe that securing an apartment requires the kind of guile and chicanery that people in the Soviet Union used to exercise in finding a piece of meat...
...Bruno wields enormous influence, with veto power over every little can of pork, which is the average legislator's main reason for being in Albany...
...In a story entitled "How to Find an Apartment (Seriously)," New York magazine once suggested "joining a church or synagogue" as a useful strategy for meeting people who might provide leads to an apartment...
...The law is renewed every three years under the pleasant fiction that the housing shortage created by rent control is only temporary and may someday go away...
...But, says one, "We're afraid to make any promises because we're worried that New York's strict zoning laws wouldn't enable us to keep them...
...Landlords agreed to a two-year phase-out, and the last controls were lifted on January 1. The predicted mass displacement of tenants has failed to materialize...
...Apartments were so plentiful that some people moved every year to take advantage of a law that required a landlord to give a new tenant a fresh paint job...
...New York was often called the "City of Nomads...
...At a time when national unemployment is 5 percent and falling, New York City's unemployment is at 10 percent and rising...
...The landlords argued effectively that rent control was destroying the property-tax base in the three cities, and that taxpayers throughout the state were making up the difference through a complex property-tax-sharing formula...
...Corporations rotating people through the front office found that employees refused to move to New York...
...New York went over its constitutional debt limit this year after investing $5.1 billion in the early 1990s to rehabilitate residential buildings—the consequence of five decades of "taking the profits out of housing...
...The median rent in New York, according to 1996 U.S...
...The next time Wall Street takes a downturn, New York will become a national basket case...
Vol. 2 • May 1997 • No. 33
