‘RUDY GIULIANI’S BANDITS’
Rent Guidelines Board Votes
4%-6% Increases, But Nixes Poor Tax
By Steven Wishnia

Despite angry disruptions by tenants chanting "No Rent Hike" and "Evict the RGB," the city Rent Guidelines Board voted June 20 to allow increases of up to 6% on rent-stabilized apartments.

The guidelines, 4% for a one-year lease renewal and 6% for two years, affect about 1 million apartments in the city. The RGB had proposed slightly lower increases, 3% and 5%, at a preliminary vote in May, but tenant groups strongly suspect that Mayor Rudolph Giuliani demanded that it give landlords more money. Giuliani, who has a history of dictating guidelines to the nine-member board, replaced three of its ostensibly neutral "public members" in late April.

The board passed the increases 7-2 with no debate. The only dissenters were Jeffrey Coleman and David Pagan, the two tenant representatives. Tenant groups, who were demanding a two-year rent freeze, won one victory. The RGB voted 5-4 against the "poor tax," a $15-a-month surcharge on apartments renting for less than $500, and rejected a minimum rent. The board had imposed some form of the poor tax every year since Giuliani took office.

Surprisingly, new public member Mort Starobin cast the deciding vote, joined by Coleman, Pagan, and public members Agustin Rivera and Bartholomew Carmody. Starobin had earlier proposed the 3% and 5% preliminary guidelines with the poor tax, but abstained--to much laughter from tenants in the crowd--when the other board members voted against it unanimously.

Coleman called the poor tax a "moral abomination," noting that "the fastest-growing segment of New York’s homeless population is homeless families." As the meeting closed, landlord representative Vincent Castellano--who obviously relishes confrontation with tenants--tried to reopen the issue, arguing that "there is no data supporting that there are poor people in these apartments." That attempt--which also included a $215 minimum rent--lost by the same 5-4 margin.

The board also voted a 2% increase on hotels, with the tenant representatives dissenting and the landlord members abstaining, and 1% and 2% increases for lofts. For vacant apartments moving out of rent control, they approved Starobin’s proposal to raise rents to 150% of the Maximum Base Rent or to the federal fair-market standard plus an "energy adjustment," whichever is greater. Coleman called it "a dangerous, pernicious vote," but only Rivera joined him and Pagan in dissent.

The protests--about 150 people attended the meeting, at Cooper Union in Manhattan--were the loudest at an RGB vote since the state government gutted rent regulations in 1997, allowing landlords to raise rents on vacant apartments by 20%. New board chair Steven Sinacori banged his gavel ineffectively as tenants chanted "Greed! Greed! Greed!"

"We have spoken until we’re blue in the face and you have not responded to us," shouted Rochelle Thompson of Harlem.

"How many times do you have to hide your faces when you see somebody living in the street?" Lower East Side poet Cenen Reyes screamed at the board.

"You see how much harm you’ve done to the city?" The board recessed several times because of the people shouting and chanting. During one recess, protesters linked arms and sang "We shall freeze our rents" to the tune of "We Shall Overcome."

Lee Holman, a technical journalist from Yorkville, was one of four people sitting in on the floor in front of the board, along with Met Council organizer Dave Powell and Harlem activist Nellie Bailey. Police asked them to leave, but didn’t arrest them when they refused to get up. "I’ve been watching my home be run into the ground for years. I’m tired of it," Holman said. He already pays over $1,100 rent, and cursed several times while calculating how much more a 6% increase would mean.

Tenant groups have been calling for a rent freeze for the past two years. According to RGB data, landlords’ net operating income has increased by an average of 10% each year since the 1997 law went into effect--even with the much-hyped fuel-cost increases of the last two years--while tenants’ incomes have stagnated or declined. "We have clear evidence that landlord profitability is at an all-time high," Coleman told the board early in the evening. But the board rejected his proposal for no increase, 7-2.

An "inside source" told Met Council the day of the vote that Mayor Giuliani had ordained the 4%/6% increases. Pagan says he didn’t know, that the public members "don’t meet with me."

However, when former Giuliani RGB chair Edward Hochman--a libertarian who opposes rent control, but told Tenant/Inquilino in June that repealing it outright would "cause riots"--quit or was fired in April, he complained about having to take orders from the mayor. The public members picked by Giuliani have generally been affluent whites who pass rent increases without a word of debate, not even a few platitudes about the need to balance landlord and tenant interests.

It is this as much as the city’s skyrocketing rents that drives tenants’ anger; the sense that the fix is in, that those charged with administering the system are not even remotely listening to their concerns. "I did my job," Hochman said. But under Giuliani, the RGB’s job has been to raise rents as much as possible without damaging the mayor’s political prospects--not that there’s much left of those these days.

"I’m looking at the future," said Lismar Leon, 14, one of a group of Lower East Side youths brought to the meeting by Good Old Lower East Side.

"You’re going to see us teenagers living on the street, because apartments are $1,000 a month. What kind of job is going to pay us that much?"