Tenants To Vallone: Do The Right Thing
Council Set to Vote on March 20
By Kenny Schaeffer

Testifying before the City Council Housing and Buildings Committee on February 25, dozens of tenants and numerous elected officials urged the Council to address the city’s housing-affordability crisis by doing more than just renewing rent regulations.

The witnesses, including City Controller Alan Hevesi, pointed out that simply renewing the expiring rent-stabilization and rent-control laws will not go far enough to address the worsening crisis. If the Council fails to enact measures supported by Met Council and sponsored by Councilmember Steve DiBrienza (D-Brooklyn) and others, they warned, it would tell New York’s one million rent-regulated families that the present Council leadership is unwilling to deal with the crisis.

Council Speaker Peter Vallone (D-Queens) has pledged that the full Council will pass Intro. 669, his bill to renew the rent laws, on March 20, together with a provision intended to discourage landlords from illegally deregulating vacant apartments by claiming rents of $2,000 a month or more.

Mayor Giuliani has already announced that he will sign the bill. This is an important victory for tenants, because Vallone, who has received hefty campaign contributions from landlords in his bid for Mayor in 2001, has frequently enacted damaging legislation. The Housing Committee approved Intro. 669 by an 8-1 vote on March 6, with the lone “no” vote coming from Republican Thomas Ognibene (R-Queens), who is also planning to run for Mayor next year.

Kill Urstadt

Speaker after speaker at the Feb. 25 hearing at City Hall repeated the same basic message in a hundred different ways: The Council must adopt immediate and long-term measures to address various aspects of the problem.

One is a resolution demanding that the state legislature repeal the Urstadt Law, a Rockefeller-era relic which bars New York City from enacting any rent regulations stricter than those established in state law. Several state senators and assembly members testified that a serious effort to force Albany to repeal this provision will not be possible until the Council demands it.

In response to this strong outcry, several sources close to Speaker Vallone, including Housing Committee chair Archie Spigner (D-Queens) and political and policy advisors including Kathy Cudahy, indicated that Intro. 801, Councilmember Stanley Michels’ (D-Manhattan) measure calling for repealing the Urstadt Law, might get serious consideration this year.

Another issue requiring immediate attention is prohibiting the Rent Guidelines Board “poor tax,” the additional monthly charge of $15 to $25 imposed on low-rent apartments in recent years. The poor tax has contributed to the loss of half the apartments renting for under $500 a month in the past six years, a loss of almost 200,000 apartments, according to the 1999 Housing and Vacancy Survey. The HVS also showed that the supply of apartments renting for between $400-599 declined by over 10% since 1996.

The DiBrienza bill would abolish both the RGB poor tax and the 7-1/2% annual increases imposed on rent-controlled tenants under the Maximum Base Rent system. The MBR provision is a little more complicated, because many rent-controlled tenants have already reached their MBR levels and are not currently liable for further increases, although landlords are suing to overturn a city law that reduced MBR increases.

The DiBrienza initiative also includes a resolution calling of the state legislature to repeal three of its recent provisions designed to cripple rent regulations: allowing minimum 18% vacancy increases on every apartment, deregulating vacant apartments that rent for $2,000, and deregulating high-income tenants’ apartments.