BRIEFS
Seniors Fight For Housing Inspectors
by Alex StaberAfter picketing Councilmember Anthony Weiner’s office against Intro 994A last December, seniors from many parts of Brooklyn are now campaigning to get the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development to hire more housing inspectors. HPD now has slightly over 200 code-enforcement inspectors, about one- quarter of what it had in 1989. With over 2,000,000 apartments regulated by the department and over 5,000,000 people living in those apartments, the need to replace the 600 inspectors whose jobs have been whittled away is obvious.
On January 20 a delegation of seniors opened up the campaign by visiting Councilmember Herbert Berman in Canarsie. After a lengthy discussion, he agreed that we certainly need more housing inspectors.
That same day we met with Councilmember and our delegation all participated in the discussion with him. He also agreed that we need many more inspectors to be hired by HPD, and pledged to support the very necessary increase.
This is the opening round of a campaign to reach all members of the City Council from Brooklyn. Mayor Giuliani proposed the new city budget on January 26, and that budget will be hammered out and voted on before June 30 by the Council. So we have a job ahead of us to urge all Councilmembers to vote for more inspectors. We challenge tenant groups all over the city to match our actions.
San Francisco Bars Evicting Elderly, AIDS Patients
by Steven WishniaFor the next 17 months, San Francisco landlords will be barred from evicting elderly, seriously ill, and disabled renters who’ve lived in their apartments long enough to qualify.
The moratorium, passed by the city Board of Supervisors and signed by Mayor Willie Brown in December, went into effect Jan. 30 and will continue until June 30, 1999. It protects tenants 60 or older or disabled who have lived in the same apartment for at least 10 years. Tenants with life-threatening diseases—primarily people with AIDS—qualify if they’ve lived there for five years.
The only exception is if the landlord wants to move a relative who is 60 or older into a protected tenant’s apartment. The moratorium does not apply to single-family homes.
Ted Gullicksen of the San Francisco Tenants Union, which has been critical of Brown for not following through on pro-tenant campaign promises since he was elected in 1995, told the San Francisco Examiner that the moratorium was “excellent.” But tenant activists want the city to stop “owner move-in” evictions on other apartments as well.
Landlord groups may sue the city to end the moratorium. They are also pushing a June referendum to abolish rent control for owner-occupied two-, three-, and four-family houses, which the city enacted in 1994.
Landlord Support Pays Off For Pataki
by Steven WishniaWhen Governor George Pataki proposed gutting New York’s rent-regulation laws last year, he may have been making the political calculation that most of the city’s rent-stabilized tenants didn’t vote for him in 1994, while real-estate interests would pay off handsomely for favors delivered. As he prepares to run for re-election this year, the Governor is reaping his rewards for undermining rent controls. Landlord contributions make up a substantial part of the $11.8 million Pataki’s campaign has collected so far, according to finance reports released in mid-January. That $11 million is more than four times what the governor’s best-financed Democratic rivals, City Council Speaker Peter Vallone and Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey Ross, have raised.
Pataki received $25,000 from former New York Post publisher Peter Kalikow, the man behind the City and Suburban Homes eviction scheme in the ’80s. Donald Trump, the egomaniacal emblem of that decade of greed, kicked in $20,000, as did fellow developers like Bernard Mendik, Daniel Brodsky, and Stephen Ross. Lewis Rudin gave $3,000. In contrast, virtually all of McCaughey Ross’ $2.3 million came from her husband, an investment banker. The Post called Pataki’s fundraising “the most aggressive by any candidate in state history,” and speculated that he might spend more than $20 million on the campaign.
Real-estate interests also contributed heavily to the state Republican Party, which took in almost $10 million in 1997 while the Democrats raised less than $700,000. The Rent Stabilization Association paid $10,000, as did Lewis Rudin. The state GOP also received five-figure corporate donations from the likes of Metropolitan Life, Equitable Insurance, Philip Morris, and MCI.