Council Moves to Renew Rent Protections
Speaker Introduces Strong Renewal Bill; DiBrienza Proposes Bill to Tackle Housing Crisis
by Kenny Schaeffer

New York City’s 1,000,000 rent-regulated famlies received two pieces of welcome news over the holiday season. City Council Speaker Peter Vallone introduced legislation to renew the city’s rent-control and rent-stabilization laws, which expire on March 31; and Councilmember Steve DiBrienza proposed a “companion bill” intended to address some of the deeper causes of New York’s acute housing affordability crisis.

The Vallone bill not only renews the rent and eviction laws with no weakening amendments, but also contains a provision to deter landlords from deregulating apartments illegally. Landlords currently deregulate vacant apartments completely when the rent reaches $2,000 a month, charge whatever rents they want, and be able to evict the new tenant without cause when the lease expires. The Vallone bill would require owners to give tenants in newly deregulated apartments notification of how the rent legally reached the $2,000 level.

Owners frequently deregulate apartments illegally, either by claiming inflated renovations to bring the rent up to $2,000 or by simply charging $2,000 or more outright. While not completely preventing this abuse, the Vallone bill offers a strong disincentive, as giving the new tenant the basis for the owner’s claim will allow them to make an intelligent decision about whether to challenge the rent.

Predictably, the Vallone bill was met with howls of protest from the real-estate industry, with absurd claims that the reporting provision punishes owners and encourages spurious challenges by tenants. As philosopher and social activist Bertrand Russell observed about a real-estate tax reform in 1910, “the excellence of this proposal is to be measured by the hostility it arouses in landlords.” By this standard, the Vallone bill will be an effective safeguard against one of the many leaks that have sprung in the rent-regulatory system in recent years as a result of relentless industry lobbying and campaign contributions.

While Met Council welcomed Speaker Vallone’s commitment on this issue, tenants are still feeling outrage and betrayal following his spearheading legislation last June gutting the laws designed to protect children from lead-paint poisoning, which he specifically promised not to do while seeking tenant support for his 1998 gubernatorial race. The real-estate industry has had special access to Vallone for many years, and owners are sure to ask for additional favors as he solicits their contributions for his expected mayoral bid in 2001, when term limits bar him from continuing in the Council.

“For this reason, we intend to keep the spotlight on the Council until the Vallone bill is passed and the ink is dry,” says Met Council director Jenny Laurie.

Councilmember Steve DiBrienza (D-Brooklyn) followed Vallone’s announcement by revealing plans to introduce, together with a number of his colleagues, a “companion bill” which would bar the Rent Guidelines Board from imposing its “poor tax”—an annual surcharge of $15-$25 paid only by tenants in apartments renting below $500 a month, who tend to be among the city’s poorest. The DiBrienza bill would also limit the annual increases of up to 7-1/2% currently paid by rent-controlled tenants, bringing them into line with the lower increases paid by rent-stabilized tenants, typically 2% on a one-year lease renewal.

These two proposals, along with renewing the rent-control and rent-stabilization laws without any further weakening, are part of DiBrienza’s five-point legislative program to address the housing-affordability crisis.

The fourth point is to repeal the “Urstadt Law,” a relic of Gov. Nelson Rockefeller’s disastrous 1971 decontrol measures, which prohibits New York City from enacting any rent controls stricter than those approved by the state. While the Council cannot repeal the Urstadt law, Councilmember Stanley Michels—a Manhattan Democrat who has been tenants’ strongest voice on the Housing & Buildings Committee for many years—has introduced a resolution demanding that the Legislature do so.

The fifth point is repealing three of the state legislature’s most recent assaults on rent regulations: the $2,000 vacancy decontrol; decontrol of apartments occupied by high-income households; and the 20% vacancy increase allowed every time a tenant moves out, which mocks “stabilization” by inflating rents sharply and giving owners a huge incentive to displace existing tenants. Again, the Council cannot repeal these provisions of state law, but it can enact a resolution urging the Legislature to act.

“From neighborhood to neighborhood throughout the New York, working and middle-income families are finding themselves priced out of this city—the young, the elderly, the poor, the middle class, everybody,” DiBrienza explains. “We need to preserve and expand the supply of affordable housing, and there are many elements to this, from keeping rent levels affordable, to ensuring adequate housing code enforcement, to the creation of new housing.

“In addition to the five-point legislative package, we need increased code-enforcement and rental-assistance programs, early identification of distressed buildings and transfer to responsible management with tenant participation, proper management of city owned buildings, and the creation of new affordable housing.”

DiBrienza, chair of the Council General Welfare Committee, is expected to run for Public Advocate next year when Mark Green steps down. He has led the successful Council resistance to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s heartless welfare initiatives, such as threats to remove homeless children from their mothers, to jail homeless people, and to kick people with AIDS off of public assistance if they do not comply with “eligibility verification review” requirements beyond those already in place at the city Division for AIDS Services and Income Support.

He has also drawn wide support for his innovative proposal to create thousands of permanent government and community jobs for people on public assistance, with decent pay and benefits, to take the place of the dead-end “workfare” jobs imposed by Giuliani and his welfare commissioner Jason Turner.

“The Vallone and DiBrienza bills give tenants something to fight for this year right here in New York City, without having to go up to Albany,” Jenny Laurie points out. “Renewing the rent-control and stabilization laws with no further weakening, and closing the door on fraudulent $2,000 regulation by making owners set forth the basis for that rent, will be a major victory, if Vallone keeps his word. But while treating some of the symptoms, it doesn’t go nearly far enough to address the causes of the steadily worsening housing crisis. The DiBrienza bill, together with the resolutions to restore home rule by repealing the Urstadt law, and to repeal the worst of the recent state encroachments on rent regulations, goes much further, and is part of an overall program to attack the problem from many directions at once.”

Tenants are encouraged to remain vigilant up through the Council vote in March. To find out how to participate in or contribute to Met Council’s campaign to enact these laws, call (212) 693-0553.