EDITORIAL

If the candidates running for Mayor this year are going to speak to the issues that affect New Yorkers, they absolutely must talk about housing. New York City is in a housing crisis. Rents have been rising since the 1970s, since Nelson Rockefeller’s disastrous experiment with vacancy decontrol. With the weakening of rent controls in 1997 and the Wall Street/Internet economic boom, they’ve exploded. Rents are now far beyond the reach of the middle class as well as the working class and the poor. This is not confined to Manhattan. Rents in the outer boroughs are hitting four figures as well. "Move to Brooklyn" is not a valid alternative. Most rent-stabilized tenants in the city take home less than $500 a week, but it’s next to impossible to find an apartment for under $500 a month anywhere in the city. If you’re paying $900 a month for a one-bedroom in Bushwick on $375 a week take-home, you have to worry about whether you can afford a newspaper or a slice of pizza--never mind a movie.

How many people are living three to a room? How many couples are living together even after they split up? How many young adults are still living with their parents because they can’t afford to move out? From the "poor tax" to high vacancy increases, from the expiration of Mitchell-Lama rent limits to the state’s near abandonment of enforcement on illegal overcharges, affordable housing is being washed away in a torrent. Yet politicians and the media largely ignore this. Outside of a few journalists and the progressive bloc of 10 or so City Councilmembers, no one speaks of this as an emergency, the way crime was spoken about 10 years ago.

This is the most important issue affecting the people of New York City. And the mayoral candidates need to talk about real solutions.

To stanch the loss of affordable housing, we need strict rent controls. If there’s a way to roll back rents, we need to find it.

Specifically, candidates need to endorse repealing the Urstadt law, the Rockefeller relic that bars the city from strengthening rent controls without Albany’s permission. They need to endorse democratic control of the Rent Guidelines Board, instead of letting the mayor pack it with rent-increase rubber stamps.

To increase the supply of affordable housing, we need a massive investment in new housing and in renovating old buildings--both of which almost stopped under Giuliani. And it has to be genuinely and permanently affordable, not the kind of development that deems $900 for a studio "middle-income." It can’t be 80/20 housing, in which developers get fat tax breaks for luxury buildings in exchange for throwing in a few token, temporarily low-rent apartments.

This will cost money, both in public funds and in less income for landlords. But it is essential to the quality of life in New York City. Landlords often question why they should have to take any responsibility for the housing crisis. If millions of people can’t afford housing, they say, it’s not their problem, as long as someone can pay the going rate. Landlords have laid claim to a right to rent-gouging, and they meet efforts to put a stop to it with a deliberately misleading question: "Why should property owners be forced to subsidize tenants?"

We need to turn that question around. About 3,000 landlords own more than half the city’s rental apartments, and demand ever-higher rents even as their profits soar. Why should the people of New York be forced to subsidize a few thousand multimillionaires?

Politicians’ failure to take strong pro-tenant stances often reflects the influence of real-estate money, the prime example of campaign-finance corruption in New York State. In state politics it is obvious; upstate Republicans like Joseph Bruno take thousands of dollars from New York City landlords to impose their agenda on us, but New York City voters can’t vote against them. In city politics it’s more subtle. How many politicians soften their attitude or downplay the issue because they’re scared of losing landlord money?

A second problem is that of the city’s three daily newspapers, The Times is a major real-estate owner, the Daily News is owned by a developer, and the Post is owned by a fanatical right-wing ideologue. Their positions on tenant issues--and on whether pro-tenant candidates get dismissed as "not serious" or "fringe"--reflect that.

But if we’re going to have a democracy, politicians need to pay attention to the concerns of the vast majority of the people. The mayoral candidates need to speak about housing as a top priority, to pay it the attention an emergency requires. They need to offer strong stances and major initiatives, not just token programs and platitudes about being "pro-tenant." They need to speak about housing often and loud.