The Rent Control Debate

(an ongoing dialogue in the L letters pages)

A well done analysis (The Life and Death of Rent Control, Adam Bonislawski, May 25); I think you've hit the nail on the head regarding the essential lottery aspect of stabilization/control.  Everyone knows they won't win the lottery, but they continue to buy tickets because it's "Hey, you never know".  This mentality has, in my opinion, taken over every aspect of our society, all the way through the war in Iraq  (WMD?  Hey, you never know!  Democracy in the Middle East by killing thousands?  Hey, you never know!). 

The truly unfortunate side-effect of rent-control is that it is both the poor and the small landlord who get screwed.   Large landlords buy the outcome they need from the tenant, city, or L&T court, and in most low-income neighborhoods, the legal rent is higher than the market rent!  The small landlord can't make money on his good properties, and so can not hope to expand or renovate housing elsewhere.  The administrative overhead/nightmare that is the DHCR and HPD is incredibly reminiscent of Soviet ministries which accomplished nothing with thousands of employees.  Any filing with these organizations can take years to resolve, and you can never get a straight answer about the status.

If Mayor Bloomberg were serious about construction jobs in New York City, he would abandon the bloviated concept of a West Side statdium and concentrate on eliminating rent-control with an incentive for small landlords to build new housing.  

Regards,

Noah Osnos

I read Adam Bonislawski's article with enthusiasm, and am glad Noah Osnos responded with another accurate description of the rent regulation fiasco in this city. It is shocking that most people who live here, especially the young and largely un-regulated (coincidentally the L's readership) continue to support a program that actually harms them. The landlord's irresponsibility in fixing that leak? The grafitti on the front door? The ugly lighting in the hallways? The stairwell filthy? You have rent regulation to thank for that. With no competition and an impossibly tight housing market, landlords have to do about zilch to rent their falling-apart apartments for high prices. And we are all to eager to comply. I've lived around the country, and have universally paid lower rent, in better quality buildings, with more responsive management everywhere else. This doesn't have to be.

But what is more shocking, is that the following week [June 8, "The Building of City Hell"] you run another op-ed which completely contradicts the wisdom of Mr. Bonislawski's. The Mayor's proposed development plans could quite possibly be savior for the high-rent and lousy conditions we have been enduring. Unfortunately the plans have been opposed by neighborhood groups and lots of young people, including Mr. Kiel, and organizations such as the Williamsburg Warriors — largely on the grounds that they don't include enough "affordable housing" — which is code word for more rent regulation. The irony is that mainstream leftist belief sells the argument that development raises prices — while all Economics 101 texts say just the opposite!

Just last week we learned how reducing regulation leads to benefits for many people; the same is true of development. More housing means lower prices and better quality. So why is Kiel espousing the old-line rhetoric of "the intractability of the profit motive" being the problem.

Growth — in places that can handle it — will bring us more public amenities such as parks; jobs and economic development, and the environmental benefit of density and transit, while thwarting the ceaseless sprawl to the suburbs and south. 

I'm totally confused by the L's editorial board's contradictory opinions. But I'm glad to see the L debating the issues in the first place.

I'd like to invite all like-minded readers to join the debate, about what kind of growth is "smart growth" at the "smartgrowthny" yahoo group, an organization devoted to defining what good growth is in this city.

Doug Michael Chaplan,

Brooklyn, NY

[The Editors respond: The issue of rent control/development/affordable housing in New York doesn’t breakdown along the traditional lines of left and right. In fact, there are many intelligent, engaged New Yorkers with strong and divergent viewpoints on this issue. Rather than focus exclusively on one of these positions, we’d like to give readers the chance to read many.]

To the L Magazine

1. The "debate" about Rent Control is yet another absolute scam by crooked hyper-capitalists and I can prove it in three sentences: They argue that rent control itself is the reason we pay such high rent — which is beyond comical (because if we legislate that, say, all studios must cost $400, well, then no studio COULD COST MORE THAN $400, duh!) — but we’ve already tested this out. NYC has no COMMERCIAL rent control whatsoever, meaning the "free market" has "free" reign, and so did commercial rent prices get lower and lower? Nope. They went in the exact OPPOSITE direction, and today, NYC has the highest commercial rental prices on Earth!

(I don’t count "Nope" as a sentence.)

Game over.

The total lies about this topic are like the total lies about most other capitalist scams, such as that “stadiums create massive economic development,” another "debate" that the crooked right wingers lost decades ago: Yankee and Shea Stadium are ghostowns, vacant 90 percent of the year, surrounded by shuttered souvenir shops and junkyards and auto body shops! In fact, stadiums actually DESTROY a local economy because even a parking lot or a public park or a ghetto apartment complex is used 12 months of the year, unlike stadiums! NYC is getting scammed harder than they know and the media won’t tell you the truth.

2. Kiel’s piece on Tax Hike Mike is a mess (The Building of City Hell, June 8), but I’ll only

address a few major errors. 

EX: he writes, "To win an election takes a good politician", but we all know that’s precisely false. All it takes is a ton of money to flood TV and radio and buy off the media with expensive advertising (so they mislead their readers who get their news from these liars) and even if you don’t have any specifics or plans whatsoever, you’re in! (See Lord Bloomberg and the Governator Arnold.)

EX: Kiel claims that Bloomberg is behind so much urban development, but does he not know that Giuliani was the one behind most of these snowjobs? (Doctoroff is a leftover Giuliani goon, like half of Bloomberg’s staff is, and most of these projects began with Giuliani, the biggest crook in town). It reminds me of the fact that 100% of people blame/credit Giuliani for bringing Disney to Times Square when it was ALL David Dinkins’ doing. (Sadly, humans are too lazy to be bothered with details.)

Christopher X. Brodeur

Adam Bonislawski's Rent Control article and a couple of subsequent letters it inspired were interesting and informative. However, the last letter, from the Lunatic Who Would Be Mayor — Christopher X. Brodeur — ran the discussion into the same ditch where all Marxist principles land when dreamers enact laws that defy real-world economics. 

Brodeur attempts to disprove the fact that Rent Control actually leads to higher rents by comparing apples to oranges. Commercial property rents and residential property rents in New York City. Nice try. Maybe he really doesn't know that different forces control the supply and demand of commercial and residential real estate. A comparison of the stock of Microsoft with the stock of Cablevision has about the same merit.

In any case, as for his loony belief that studio apartments would rent for $400 a month if the law limited rent to that amount, well, that proves he really doesn't understand the gray market of New York City real estate where the lucky dogs holding leases on cheap apartments regularly sublet them for lots more than sublet rules allow — because they can. Because a market of those willing to pay more than the stated rate is alive and strong. Or, if the leaseholders don't peel some extra dough from their subtenants on a monthly basis, they demand "key money", a big hefty fee, up front, in exchange for allowing the subtenants to pay the low rent-controlled rate over the period of the lease. 

By the way, I wonder if Brodeur has ever tried to buy tickets to a hot event? Yeah, sure, ticket scalping is against the law. I guess that means all tickets are sold at face value.

As for Brodeur's other contention that it's a capitalist lie that "stadiums create massive economic development", well, if he means economic "development" in terms of short-term construction jobs and changes in neighborhoods, then, yes they do lead to development. If he wants to debate whether stadiums bring long-term economic benefit to areas like the streets around Yankee Stadium or Shea Stadium, well, that's trickier. However, looking at the former site of Ebbets Field in Brooklyn might be instructive. 

After Walter O'Malley was told by Robert Moses that New York City wasn't going to back his plan to build a new stadium for the Dodgers on the exact site where Bruce Ratner is about to build a new arena for the Nets, O'Malley and the Dodgers headed west to become one of the most commercially successful teams in Major League Baseball. Back in Brooklyn the site of the proposed new Dodger Stadium sat undeveloped for almost fifty years while the city dithered about what should rise on the space over the rail yards.

Meanwhile, Ebbets Field was demolished and the Ebbets Field housing project

eventually replaced it. Interestingly, around the housing project and along the streets that ring the neighborhood where the old ball field once stood you will find pretty much the same businesses and business activities you find around both Yankee and Shea Stadiums. There may be more junkyards (lucrative metal recycling businesses) around Shea than the other two sites, but other than that, not much separates the overall economic state of the neighborhoods. Except that you can be certain many tax dollars are remitted directly to the residents of the Ebbets Field housing project. Does paying people to live on the site of an old ball field beat having a ball field? Probably not.

Regarding Brodeur's other rants about rents, well, my advice to him is buy a home to live in. If he can't afford to buy even a tiny place on the rim of the city, he can go home and live with his parents. I'm sure they'd love to have him back.

Chris Bischof

Brooklyn, NY

[For the unexpurgated version of Mr. Bischof’s letter, and a full look at the preceding letters and ariticles, visit www.thelmagazine.com]