City Council Renews Rent Laws
But Vallone Blocks Decontrol Repeal

By Jenny Laurie

On Monday, March 31, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani signed the renewal of rent stabilization into law and completed the process of extending the New York City versions of rent control and stabilization for three more years.

However, City Council Speaker Peter Vallone (D-Queens) blocked tenants’ attempts to repeal the 1994 decontrol amendments, which deregulated apartments where the landlord was charging $2,000 a month or more if they were vacant or if the tenants had earned $250,000 in both of the previous two years. Tenants won a partial victory by forcing the Council leadership to limit vacancy decontrol to apartments where the previous tenant was already paying at least $2,000.

The renewal process now shifts to the state Legislature, where the rent laws expire again on June 15, and Republicans, who control the State Senate and the governorship, have declared their intent to end controls or severely curtail them.

With both Giuliani and the entire City Council up for re-election this fall, tenants were confident that the city rent laws would be renewed. (The Council’s vote to extend rent control did not require the Mayor's approval.) No Councilmember tried to let the laws expire, and none made a serious attempt to expand the 1994 decontrol measures.

Instead, tenants defined the struggle in the Council as whether it would strengthen the rent laws by repealing those amendments. Tenant groups prepared for the battle by working with Manhattan Democrats Stanley Michels and C. Virginia Fields, beginning in January 1996, to get a bill introduced that would repeal them.

But in late February, Vallone unexpectedly blocked the bill's filing. The Speaker had moved up the date of the Council meeting where it was supposed to be introduced, and Michels was out of the country on vacation. Arguing that the bill could not be accepted for filing for a number of reasons, the Speaker told Michels’ staff and Fields that he would not let it be introduced.

Vallone was the architect of the 1994 decontrol provisions, which had been written into state law for a three-month window that expired on October 1, 1993. His resurrection of the expired state provisions in the Council made them permanent.

In response to Vallone's bottling up the Michels-Fields bill, angry tenants set up regular Friday pickets of his Astoria district office, jammed his phone lines, and mounted a letter-writing campaign to him and other Councilmembers. But tenants were unable to get enough Councilmembers to defy the Speaker and sign onto the repeal bill to make it viable.

On March 11, about 200 tenants jammed the City Hall hearing room as the Housing Committee heard testimony on Vallone’s renewal bill. Tenant after tenant criticized the proposed extension of the 1994 decontrol amendments and urged all Councilmembers to vote against them. Very few landlords participated in the hearing, and tenant testimony went on late into the evening. However, only the Vallone bill was on the committee's agenda, so tenants were prohibited from urging a vote for the Michels-Fields bill.

The Michels-Fields bill was finally introduced at the full Council meeting two days later. After the brief meeting, Michels informed his supporters that continued pressure on Vallone had forced the Speaker to offer compromise language to his own bill.

Michels announced that he was inclined to go along with the compromise and not pursue his own bill any longer. He also made it clear that its language was incomplete and subject to change by Vallone's staff. Tenants balked at being asked to sign on to what amounted to a blank check.

When the Housing Committee met again on March 15, two hours late, Vallone had come up with his final compromise bill, Intro. 920A, which limited vacancy decontrol to apartments where the previous tenant had been paying $2,000 or more. (Landlords have used the 1994 amendments to decontrol any vacant apartment they were asking at least $2,000 for.) Council staff distributed it to waiting tenants as the committee members entered the hearing room.

The Michels-Fields bill, Intro. 930, was voted on first. The committee favored it by a 4-3 margin, but this was short of the five votes needed to report it out to the full Council. It then approved the Vallone bill, 5-2, with Antonio Pagan (D-Manhattan) and Thomas Ognibene (R-Queens)--probably the two most prominently anti-tenant Councilmembers--voting against it. Pagan, a co-sponsor of the original Vallone bill, went on the record to remove his name from it, complaining that he had not been consulted about the amendments. Committee chair Archie Spigner (D-Queens), a close if inept Vallone ally, claimed that the amendments did what the Council had intended to do when it adopted the decontrol measures in 1994.

At the full Council meeting on March 25, hundreds of tenants in the gallery and others in the overflow Council Hearing Room listened to the debate on the Vallone renewal bill. One after another, Councilmembers went on the record in favor of renewing the rent laws, simultaneously deploring that they were forced to extend the 1994 decontrol as well.

All had the opportunity to offer a floor amendment to repeal the decontrol provisions. But besides Republican Minority Leader Ognibene and Michels and Fields themselves, no Councilmember mentioned the Michels-Fields bill. Ognibene mocked his colleagues by placing a copy of the bill on the table and daring any of the Democrats to pick it up and offer it as a floor amendment. But all of them had signed on to Vallone’s desire to continue decontrol for the real-estate industry. While the debate continued, landlord lobbyist Joseph Strasburg, the Speaker's former chief of staff, could be seen across the chamber through the half-open door to an adjacent hearing room, walking back and forth joking with Council staffers, a picture of power in control of the situation.

The day after the vote, Vallone released a statement saying that the Council had done its work and extended the rent laws, and that in doing so he believed he was protecting tenants "in occupancy," an artfully phrased way of saying that he supported decontrol for apartments that become empty.

He emphasized that the matter was now entirely in the hands of the state Legislature, and that tenants should contact state officials with the message "that you expect both tenants and landlords to be treated fairly, as we have tried to do here in the City Council." If the Legislature treats tenants as the City Council has, we have much to worry about.