Tenants Sleep-In at City Hall,
Call For RGB Reform, Affordable Housing
By Dave Powell

For many years, the tenant onslaught against the Rent Guidelines Board has been an annual event. Tenant groups mobilize for its public hearing and vote on rent increases for stabilized housing, both of which occur in June. But by the time the RGB’s rent increases take affect on Oct. 1, the issue has faded into obscurity, where it usually remains until May. That may be changing.

On Sunday, Oct. 1, over 200 tenants gathered at City Hall’s northeast plaza, calling for reforms to the RGB and for city government to address the affordable-housing crisis. The rally fed into an overnight vigil with close to 40 participants, 25 of whom made attempts to sleep. At dawn the next day, the overnighters were awakened by the news media and gave interviews. By 8 AM, tenant reinforcements arrived to help leaflet commuters on their way to work. The event closed with a press conference at which State Senator Tom Duane and Assemblymember Scott Stringer echoed the protesters’ demands and criticized the Giuliani administration for its inaction.

Allies, a Party Crasher and a Rude Awakening

Met Council was joined by many groups, including the West Side SRO Law Project, Good Old Lower East Side, Center for the Independence of the Disabled, AIDS Housing Network, and the City-Wide Tenant Coalition. Councilmember Bill Perkins, unable to make the Monday morning press conference, stopped by on Sunday to lend his support.

But the strongest reaction from the Sunday-evening crowd came when RGB chair Ed Hochman showed up on the scene. He immediately made a beeline for the cameras and, with a smirk and smugness that even a mother can’t love, attempted to derail the protest with shoulder-shrugging jokes and landlord rhetoric. He was quickly chased off the City Hall plaza and retreated to the Brooklyn Bridge footpath, where Met Council’s Susan Howard debated him in front of the few news cameras that had followed.

An hour later, Hochman snuck back onto to the plaza and made a final play for the cameras. He was again quickly chased off by tenants chanting "Ed Must Go!" While hightailing it towards Beekman Street, Hochman was asked by a reporter if it bothered him to be universally loathed by the tenants of New York. He replied that the RGB was hated equally by both landlords and tenants, which indicates that they are doing their job properly. "We deal out rough justice on a broad scale," he said.

The overnighters settled into their bedrolls without incident until 3 AM, when they were rudely awakened. Sprinklers from nearby City Hall Park began sputtering, sending protesters running for dry ground and soaking some sleeping bags. Luckily, the temperature stayed in the upper 50s and no one got sick. Was it just bad timing or Rudy zapping us by remote control? We must also thank Chris Dunn of the New York Civil Liberties Union, who once again defended our right to sleep-in. Last June, Dunn went to federal court for Met Council over our right to sleep-in outside of Gracie Mansion.

Rudy Needs Checks & Balances

The "Giulianiville" sleep-in not only marks the first time in a long time that the RGB has been criticized "out of season," it also represents a diversification in tactical approaches to the issue. The tenant movement has criticized the mayor, picketed RGB members’ homes, disrupted hearings, and of course, pleaded the case for 0% increases exhaustively before the board itself. But with this event, Met Council is leading an initiative to challenge the mayor’s monopoly on appointing RGB members and to have certain current members removed.

The City Council currently has the power of advice and consent on the appointees to many city agencies, from Board of Health to the Taxi and Limousine Commission. The fact that RGB appointees are not subject to the same checks and balances as other city boards helps explain the board’s conduct towards tenants.

Legislation giving the Council approval power over RGB appointees has been proposed before, by Councilmember Stanley Michels. A current push to give the Council such authority is being sponsored by Michels and Councilmembers Bill Perkins, Guillermo Linares, Phil Reed and Helen Marshall.

There is also a renewed push for the passage of Intro 729, a bill introduced by Councilmember Steve DiBrienza that would prevent the RGB’s from levying a "poor tax" on low-rent, stabilized apartments. The bill was introduced last spring, but has stalled under the grip of Council Speaker Peter Vallone. Whether Vallone will also stall attempts to give the Council approval power over RGB appointees remains to be seen.

Fire "The Two Eds"

The nine-member RGB is supposed to consist of two landlord representatives, two tenant representatives and five "public" representatives, including the chair. But the five public members of the board, four of whom were named by Giuliani, now function more as landlord representatives than as neutral parties.

Nowhere is the RGB’s animosity for tenants more obvious than with its chair, Ed Hochman, and public member Ed Weinstein. Hochman has bullied and insulted tenants regularly at public meetings and hearings. He has also schemed to "run the clock" at these proceedings by making informal comments and allowing landlords to testify beyond their allotted time, insuring that tenants who sign up to testify are denied that opportunity. At the public hearing last June 15, less than a quarter of the 125 tenants scheduled for the evening "apartments" section got to speak.

Weinstein has also shown a lack of professionalism in dealing with tenants. At the June 15 hearing, he ordered the Police Department’s Intelligence Division to remove peaceful tenants who spoke out of turn. Four tenants were arrested.

Of course, the most compelling argument for canning "the two Eds" (and the majority of the RGB) can be found in the unjustified increases they pass annually. The 4 and 6% increases (along with the $15 a month "poor tax") affecting leases that begin or are renewed between October 1, 2000 and Sept. 30, 2001, are the highest increases passed by the RGB since 1996.

The RGB’s own studies show that profits from stabilized apartments are at an all-time high. Landlords’ net operating income (the difference between income and operating costs) jumped to 11.4% in 1997 and then another 11.8% in 1998. At the same time, their costs went up no more than 0.1% each year. (Source: RGB 2000 Income and Expense Study) Yet based on these figures, the RGB concluded that landlords deserved high increases.

The RGB also voted for the poor tax, so named because the average annual income of tenants who get it is $15,000. Nearly 70% of the tenants affected are Black or Latino. The RGB has imposed the poor tax every year since Giuliani took office. In that time, nearly half of the under-$500 housing stock has been lost, from 417,438 units in 1993 to 209,725 in 1999. (Source: 1993-1999 Housing and Vacancy Surveys)

Another key component to the Giulianiville sleep-in was the demand for affordable housing. While the RGB is gouging stabilized rents with its high increases, the Giuliani administration is also dismantling what’s left of New York’s other affordable housing, and doing nothing to create more. The reality for tenants living in non-stabilized housing is not a bright one:

• Despite an eight-year waiting list for public housing, the New York City Housing Authority has announced plans to demolish projects in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Other developments are threatened by proposals to "privatize" (turn into market-rate housing) and to displace low-income tenants with higher-income tenants.
• There is also a long waiting list for Section 8 vouchers (a program that provides federal assistance to tenants so they can pay market rents), and that list has been now closed. New Section 8 assistance is restricted to a small number of families in city programs.
• The Mitchell-Lama program, which created 150,000 units of affordable housing from the 1950s to the 1970s, has a five to 10-year waiting list. The city has lost 35,000 Mitchell-Lama units in recent years, and will lose thousands more in the coming years.
• The inventory of single-room-occupancy units is also dwindling, from 129,000 in 1960 to roughly 36,000 today. This decline is largely fueled by NYC’s booming tourist industry, with many SRO landlords displacing longtime tenants in favor of wealthy tourists.
• Despite a $52 million a year budget for building housing for people with AIDS, Giuliani’s Department of AIDS Services and Income Support has built no housing for the past three years. By law, homeless people with AIDS are guaranteed the right to emergency housing within one business day. But since late August, DASIS caseworkers have been sending up to 150 people out to sleep on the streets each night.
• Supportive housing for tenants with disabilities represents some of the most expensive housing in the city. The subsidies that make this crucial housing affordable for low and moderate-income disabled tenants (like Section 8) have been frozen. Low-income disabled tenants are also excluded from rent-increase-exemption programs that are offered to the elderly, like SCRIE.

New York City has one of the lowest rates of housing construction of any city in the country. While our population has increased by nearly 350,000 since 1990, only 50,000 new units have been built, nearly all of which are luxury housing. (Source: CUNY Grad Center Report, 2000) The 1999 housing vacancy rate was 3.19%. (A housing emergency is legally defined at 5%.) Out of 2 million rental units in the city, only 64,000 were vacant and available for rent, a 21% decrease from the previous survey in 1996. The vacancy rate for low-rent units is extremely low: 1.26% for apartments renting below $500. (Source: 1999 Housing & Vacancy Survey)

Economic growth in the city has sent rents skyrocketing, but wages for middle, moderate, and low-income households have gone up little, if at all. The result is that family-sized apartments are simply out of reach for a large percentage of New Yorkers. One-fourth of New York City renter households pay over half their income for rent. Over 1.8 million New Yorkers live below the federal poverty line. (Source: Community Food Resource Center) The Office of Court Administration reported that nearly 25,000 tenants were evicted in 1999 (this figure does not include tenants who were evicted illegally). The majority of these people were evicted because they were unable to pay their rent.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

-- Call your City Councilmember and tell them to sponsor legislation giving the City Council approval power over RGB appointees. Giuliani should not be given this power unchecked! To find out who your Councilmember is, call the League of Women Voters, (212) 677-5050, or see: www.council.nyc.ny.us.

-- Call Mayor Giuliani, (212) 788-9600. Demand that he immediately fire "the two Eds" (Hochman and Weinstein) from the RGB. Demand that he diversify the board and appoint members who are not hostile towards tenants.

-- Call Council Speaker Peter Vallone, (718) 274-4500. Demand that he allow a hearing for Intro 729, which will abolish the "poor tax." Vallone has prevented this bill from moving forward.

-- Ask all your elected officials, and all candidates running for office, what plans they have for preserving and creating truly affordable housing in New York. We must make housing an issue they can’t ignore! With 51 City Council seats and Gracie Mansion up for grabs in 2001 and the contest for the governorship in 2002, tenants should be pressing all candidates on their plans for the creation of affordable housing. At the moment housing is not an issue that candidates feel they must even speak to. Our work is definitely cut out for us.