Push for 8% jump in rents

Landlords vs. DeB

City landlords, facing the possibility of a rent freeze for the third year in a row, proposed an increase as high as 8 percent on Thursday at a hearing of the Rent Guidelines Board.

Citing the board’s own study that landlord expenses climbed 6.2 percent last year, owner representatives called for a rent hike of 4 percent for new one-year leases and 8 percent for two years for the city’s 1 million rent-stabilized apartments. But they weren’t too hopeful. “This year’s numbers clearly demonstrate justification for a rent increase, but it’s an election year and [Mayor] de Blasio controls all nine members of the RGB,” Joseph Strasburg, president of the Rent Stabilization Association, said before the hearing.

His group represents 25,000 landlords.

Under de Blasio, the board in 2015 froze rents on one-year leases for the first time in its history. Then it imposed another freeze in 2016.

That has landlords pleading to be spared another zero hike this year. “If you want to keep losing business — the business of providing decent affordable housing for your tenants — then you need to react to the objective data before you, which reflects building oper- ating costs, and provide an appropriate rent increase to property owners,” Jack Freund, the association’s executive VP, told the board.

But Sheila Garcia, a board appointee representing tenants, fired back that she and her colleagues are responsible for looking at other economic factors, such as the “rising numbers in homelessness” and an “income-to-rent ratio” that makes it hard for renters to stay afloat.

Other tenant advocates said the shaky finances of many rent-stabilized residents warrant another freeze. “Given the likelihood that tenants’ finances have not fully recovered since the recession, we believe it is prudent to continue to bend towards tenants for another year,” said Tom Waters, a housing-policy analyst for the Community Service Society.

Tim Collins, a former executive director of the RGB in the early 1990s, told the board the landlords’ 6.2 percent cost increase last year was eclipsed by the substantial raises they received during the Bloomberg administration.

“During the Bloomberg years, the board was engaged in a march to the market,” he told reporters.

Following more public hearings, the board will take a preliminary vote on the new rent rates on Tuesday night. The final vote, affecting leases that expire Oct. 1 or later, is scheduled for June 27.