Tenant/Inquilino has been alerting tenants for months now: In March, the City Council will once again be voting on whether to renew rent control and rent stabilization.
It is also the time for the City Council and Mayor Giuliani to make amends for the unprecedented cowardly and corrupt cave-in to the real estate industry known as Local Law 4, passed in 1994. Under the pretext of deregulating "luxury" apartments, the Council allowed landlords to charge any rent they pleased for vacant apartments, and to rent vacant apartments without basic anti-eviction protections, so long as they assert a phony claim that the rent has reached $2,000 per month.
The result has been exactly what we predicted at the time: entire neighborhoods where many apartments have become removed from rent regulation, where harassment to obtain vacancies is widespread, and where even middle-class families can no longer find an affordable vacant apartment.
The City Council allowed, indeed encouraged, the wholesale disappearance of affordable apartments, without any oversight and without any process for verifying landlords' inflated rent-increase claims. We have seen apartments where the roof constantly leaks, where there is no reliable supply of heat and hot water, where the windows are rotted and cracked, that have been deregulated-based on the landlord's telling the tenant that the rent has reached more than $2,000 a month.
This situation is the direct result of votes by Councilmembers from working-class districts, who deluded themselves into thinking that the only tenants who would be affected are the Mia Farrows of the world and saw the opportunity to score easy points with real-estate industry donors and the Council leadership. If these Councilmembers did not know it at the time, it is certainly clear now that the landlord lobby's goal, short- and long-term, was the beginning of the end of rent regulations. Now is the time for the Council, the Mayor, and all elected officials to face the reality that every neighborhood in this city, from Fordham to Flushing, has been affected. Perhaps "infected" would be the better term.
Met Council and the Showdown '97 coalition of tenant and community groups are introducing a bill that would repeal the 1994 Local Law 4 this year. If middle-class people are ever going to be able to rent an affordable apartment anywhere in this city again, this bill must be passed. Call your Councilmember today.