All above board
The conversation around New York’s rent stabilization is very emotional. After all, we’re talking about people’s homes and their ability to stay in them, a prerequisite for all other stability and prosperity in a city with a notoriously limited housing stock. With the announcement last week that the Rent Guidelines Board — charged with setting policy for the city’s roughly 1 million rent-stabilized units — had preliminarily voted rent increases of 2% to 4% on one-year leases and 4% to 6% for two-year leases, recriminations came from every angle. Tenant groups accused the nine-member board of mayoral appointees of throwing them to the wolves amid a recovering economy, and landlord organizations denounced what they saw as a failure to let them cover their costs.
It’s true that inflationary pressures, a slower-thanhoped-for bounce-back in employment, and the lingering economic effects of COVID have put strain on many of the finances of the roughly 2.4 million stabilized tenants, who on average have lower incomes than the general population.
It’s also true that we can’t operate on the same assumptions we did prior to 2019’s Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, which essentially made the board’s decisions all-encompassing by limiting landlords’ ability to raise rents even after vacancies. It certainly doesn’t serve tenants for it to be untenable to actually operate stabilized units and conduct necessary maintenance and repairs.
Landlords are contending with the very same inflation, mostly in the form of rising property taxes and energy costs, and are coming off a period of about a decade of low or nonexistent increases, which made a sharp adjustment at some point almost inevitable, though their own dissatisfaction is a good indicator that these increases aren’t exactly profit generators.
If tenants want someone to blame for a too-sharp increase, they should look to Mayor de Blasio, who — demanding no increase whatsoever for three years total and overseeing an average of just 1% increases the rest of his tenure — took the credit card approach for political expediency. Now the bill has come due.