City Hall Rally Backs RGB-Reform Bill
By Steven Wishnia

Sixteen City Councilmembers have introduced a bill to give the City Council power over appointments to the Rent Guidelines Board, which determines annual rent increases for the city’s 1 million rent-stabilized apartments. The move reflects growing tenant anger that Mayor Giuliani’s appointees to the nine-member board have simply been a rubber stamp for rent increases, taking orders from the mayor while ignoring both its own statistics and tenants’ plights. “RGB has come to stand for Rudy Giuliani’s Boys,” Met Council’s Kenny Schaeffer declared outside City Hall at a Dec. 19 rally supporting the bill.

The rally got sandwiched between two other City Hall protests, one against the death penalty and one for community gardens. It wound up drawing supporters from both. Sister Helen Prejean, the anti-execution activist made famous by the Dead Man Walking film, welcomed “those protesting rent increases” to City Hall Plaza in her Louisiana accent. “The issues are linked,” she said, without mentioning that the same governor who brought the death penalty back to New York has spent much of his tenure trying to destroy tenant protections. And Jose Enriquez of the Lower East Side, holding up one end of a “Rudy’s RGB: Time for a Change” banner, confessed, “I’m here with the gardens.”

The bill, Intro 859, has 16 cosponsors in the Council: Stanley Michels, Chris Quinn, Margarita Lopez, Bill Perkins, Phil Reed, Ronnie Eldridge, Guillermo Linares, Gifford Miller, and Eva Moskowitz of Manhattan; Wendell Foster and Adolfo Carrion of the Bronx; Steve DiBrienza, Michael Nelson, and Angel Rodriguez of Brooklyn; and Helen Marshall and Sheldon Leffler of Queens.

Currently, the mayor picks board members. “There are no checks or balances,” former RGB tenant representative Ken Rosenfeld told the crowd of about 75 people. “The members are appointed to cover the mayor’s backside as rents rise.” Rosenfeld, an outspoken tenant advocate, was forced off the board in 1999 when Giuliani refused to reappoint him.

“What we’re asking for is just fairness,” Councilmember Gifford Miller said, noting that the Council approves appointments to the Art Commission and the Taxi and Limousine Commission. Miller is the only Republican among the bill’s sponsors.

The bill would also change the qualifications needed to serve on the RGB. Currently, board members need five years experience in finance, economics or housing. The bill would drop finance and economics and add public service and work with nonprofit organizations—or as Councilmember Christine Quinn put it, open the board up to “people without financial backgrounds other than paying rent.” Giuliani’s appointees to the board have been predominantly bankers, accountants, and corporate lawyers.

While the RGB has no power over many of the most drastic rent increases—state law sets the size of vacancy increases, provides giant legal loopholes for renovations and ever-weaker enforcement of illegal overcharges, and bans the city from enacting stricter limits on rents—it has increasingly become a lightning rod for tenant ire.

“The RGB has been fighting a war against tenants,” Brooklyn community organizer Artemio Guerra said at the rally. “Queens is being devastated because of the RGB,” added Bob Katz of the Queens League of United Tenants.

As the only branch of city government with power over rents, the RGB has voted steady and significant increases for tenants in place, well above what its own studies show landlords’ costs to be. In 1998 and 1999, when RGB researchers estimated that landlords’ costs had risen by 0.1% in the previous year, the board voted a 4% increase for tenants renewing a two-year lease. Last year, it used spiking fuel prices as a rationale for a 6% increase.

This year, with fuel costs still high, it is likely to propose similar or higher increases. (Although, with no-heat complaints up 17% over last year, some landlords may not be spending as much on fuel as they claim.)

The RGB has passed these increases with little or no public debate. And despite board chair Edward Hochman’s protestations of neutrality, the five “public members” overwhelmingly vote against tenants, on issues ranging from the “poor tax” surcharge on low-rent apartments to how much landlords can raise rents on vacant rent-controlled apartments.

Many tenants also feel that the RGB treats them with contempt, giving their testimony short shrift at the public hearings held before the annual vote setting rent-increase guidelines. “Not one of them can relate to the problems of living in a house, because they live so sumptuously” QLOUT member Ida Pollack of Bellerose said after the rally.1