Editorial: Silence = Giuliani
Why Wasn’t Housing an Issue in the Mayoral Campaign?

One crucial issue was a lost completely absent from this year's mayoral campaign: housing.

As most readers of Tenant know, New York City is in the throes of a colossal housing crisis. Homelessness is only the tip of the iceberg. The dearth of affordable housing reaches well up into the middle class. Rent-stabilized tenants on average pay almost one-third of their incomes in rent, with a median income of $21,000 a year, but a median rent of $642 a month. It is now almost impossible to find a vacant apartment for under $600 outside the city's poorest and most isolated areas, and two-bedroom apartments in middle-class neighborhoods are well over $1,000 and rising fast. Yet both mayoral candidates were strangely quiet on the issue, especially after the rent-stabilization laws were renewed in June.

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's silence was understandable, because his record on tenant issues has been abysmal. Follow the money -- the hundreds of thousands of dollars real-estate interests gave to his campaign, much of it in illegally high contributions -- and check the services rendered: in 1995, the vacancy-decontrol scheme his appointees on the city Rent Guidelines Board almost pushed through; in 1996, the biggest increases for rent-stabilized apartments in nearly a decade; and three consecutive years of extra increases on apartments renting for $400 or less, the homes overwhelmingly occupied by the poorest tenants.

Giuliani's record on evictions has been especially brutal. In 1995, an army equipped with assault rifles and a tank invaded East 13th Street to evict squatters from three buildings there, even though they had a lawsuit to keep the buildings pending. (One of his illegal contributors was the contractor now renovating those buildings for the city.) Last February, the city began knocking down another Lower East Side squat with one resident still inside the building, and ignored two court orders to halt the demolition. In July, the city demolished a rooming house on East First Street with tenants' pets and possessions still inside.

Though the Mayor endorsed renewing the rent-control laws last spring, his support for them was tepid, almost token. He did not criticize the eventual weakening of the laws, and he did not bring an iota of his normal pugnaciousness to the issue. While strong organizing by public-housing tenants has prevented him from doing much damage there, who knows what kind of schemes the privatization fiends of the Manhattan Institute are brewing for his second term.

Yet Ruth Messinger failed to capitalize on this. Though she criticized Giuliani during the rent-control debate, she was relatively quiet for most of it; even Councilmember Sal Albanese's pathetically underfinanced campaign was more visible. Her campaign focused on education, on reinventing government, on Giuliani's "meanness," but she said little about housing. It was conspicuously absent from the list of the city's unsolved problems she cited in her concession speech.

This is mystifying, and may have been the error that doomed her campaign. If there is one area in which most New Yorkers have beendistinctly worse off under Giuliani, it is housing costs. If Messinger wanted an issue to distinguish herself from the Mayor, an issue where she could have lambasted his record in a way that would connect with voters, the answer should have been as blatantly outrageous as an ad for a $1,500 "shareable 1BR."

Messinger had a strong record as a tenant advocate as a City Councilmember and went out on a limb to support commercial rent control in the '80s, earning her the enmity and derision of much of the city's power elite. Was she trying to shake off the stereotype of an "Upper West Side liberal," or avoid alienating wealthy contributors and the New York Times editorial board? If she was, it was futile. Just as the power elite opposed rent controls, they acted as if any opposition to Giuliani was as absurd as wanting to turn the New York Stock Exchange into a crackhouse. Messinger didn't get any support from these quarters, and she failed to inspire what should have been her natural constituency.

In contrast, Margarita Lopez, campaigning as an outspoken tenant advocate, won election to the City Council from a base of strong grass-roots organizing. One might argue that her Lower East Side district is significantly to the left of the rest of the city, but that didn't stop it from electing rabid Giuliani Democrat Antonio Pagan in 1991 and 1993. Lopez edged out a Sheldon Silver protege in the Democratic primary and took nearly two-thirds of the vote in the general election-while Giuliani was carrying Lower Manhattan.

The housing issue is not going to go away. How can people of little or modest means, the city's teachers, taxi drivers, secretaries, factory workers, artists, and deli clerks, afford to stay here, unless they live doubled and tripled up like turn-of-the-century immigrants? With the private sector geared toward getting the highest rents possible, little or no money for public housing forthcoming, and the rent-control-system riddled with loopholes, the future does not look bright.