16 ms·

NYC housing court, created to protect tenants, has become a tool for landlords

132 points by danso 8y ago

noonespecial 8y ago
Even if a case is shown to be baseless, just being sued can hurt a tenant’s ability to rent a new apartment. We have this list, we have credit score lists, CLUE, and even sex offenders lists... How about one more: The "I'm a cartoon villain" list. If you, for example, evict a little old lady in your greed for more rent even though your net worth exceeds some given amount, you get added straight to the list. Because that's cartoon level villainy right there. That should follow you for life.
- sigstoat 8y ago
  if the property is owned by a REIT, which is itself owned largely by retirees, who exactly goes on the list? (i just looked up a bunch of major REITs, and only EQR, Equity Residential, has >1% ownership by insiders. despite that, it has ~96% institutional ownership, with vanguard at 14.4%.)
  - ryanobjc 8y ago
    This is the right answer, because ownership of property and rental income has become securitized and made in to these complex financial instruments. The real work has gotten very complex indeed.
    - dd36 8y ago
      Automated greed. It's like a block chain where nobody is really in charge.
  - noonespecial 8y ago
    As tempting as it is to just completely diffuse the blame and claim its "nobody" or "the system", there are humans at the tip of the spear. Even if its just the lawyers who choose to take the case or the muscle who shows up to do the eviction. "I'm just doing my job" when you're obviously taking a helpless old lady's home factors out to "I knew it was wrong, I just did it for the money". Our loss of shame as a society and as individuals is truly dumbfounding.
    - perl4ever 8y ago
      Sounds like you might be interested in David Hogg's boycott of Vanguard, albeit for different reasons. To me, it's just tilting at windmills, but that seems to be becoming more popular these days.
Regardsyjc 8y ago
Evictions destabilize neighborhoods and ruin lives. Evicted by Matthew Desmond is a great book on this issue. It is infuriating some of the predatory, senseless, ruthless, scumbag business practices that slum lords use and crazy to discover that this is a recent development starting from the 60s. Also shout out to Justfix.nyc, a startup using tech to tackle this issue. One of their projects is this website they made to help. https://www.evictionfreenyc.org https://www.evictionfreenyc.org
- chiefalchemist 8y ago
  I read Evicted. Great book! A must read. Word of advice to anyone who picks it up. Read the final chapter or two first. It's where he gets into the weeds of the data and such. If you start at the beginning and get bored, get distracted, give up, etc. before the end you're going to miss the best part. Don't get me wrong, the stories are great. But just the same it gets disheartening, if not depressing.
  - Khol 8y ago
    I read this over christmas and was completely engrossed (to the extent of being borderline antisocial). I can certainly understand how you might find it disheartening and depressing, but I don't know I could quite see bored. The retelling of the situations was captivating, and the descriptions of how the system fails those most in need was harrowing at times. I've been recommending it to anyone who will listen.
    - chiefalchemist 8y ago
      I'm not saying __I__ got bored :) However, the truth is, plenty of books get started and are never finished. Since the bit at the end was so factually important to the discussion of the issue, I didn't want that to be missed. Imho, he should have started there.
      - Khol 8y ago
        I'm certainly guilty of getting partway through books and never returning, but I don't know that if I'd jumped into the data first I would have been so engrossed. (Obviously this is entirely a personal perspective.)
RickJWagner 8y ago
I wonder if the Orbach Group has any ties to Jerry Orbach, 'Lenny' from Law and Order and the father figure in 'Dirty Dancing'.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  Fun fact he was known as "Mr Broadway" in his early career he performed in numerous shows. Completely off topic but that really was the golden era of law and order
chiefalchemist 8y ago
The truth is, big real estate companies have the resources and the incentive to be aggressive. But perhaps that's the root of the problem? With so many units at below market rates, the current new to the market units get priced to cover the "loss" of the controlled units? And then of course there's the incentive. I'm not defending the practice. But I am suggesting - similar to housing and a college edu - that "government intervention" often has unintended consequences.
- knuththetruth 8y ago
  The government intervenes on behalf of Global Capital in the housing market all the time, allowing them to turn a basic necessity (shelter) into a vehicle for things like international money-laundering and finacialized speculation. These are the circumstances that have created the housing crisis we have now and previously took down the entire economy. I’m confused as to why you single out trying to intervene on behalf of the average person over the wealthy as the source of the problem when the “free market” term setting has caused the massive distortions and unaffordablity.
  - ryanobjc 8y ago
    Common myth of the 'free market' - the reality is the market is totally constrained in many ways by the political and legal system. There is definitely something very 'i am very smart'-like about tech nerds defending 'the market' against any attempts of humanizing life. "um, actually the free market will..." Governments exist to provide super-market force. Safety regulation being kind of a prime example, especially for employees. OSHA is anti-free market -- there should be no safety regulations, and let employees the freedom to choose safety or pay and let the free market work it out. Right?
    - pitaj 8y ago
      The market is very good at allocating resources, setting prices, and meeting demand. Countries with freer economies like Switzerland and Hong Kong have higher standard of living on average. Countries which free up their economies have higher relative standards of living after doing so. Countries which oppress their economies have lower relative standards of living after doing so. (By relative, I mean relative to the growth rates of neighboring countries and before the changes, as standards of living rarely decrease absolutely).
chimeracoder 8y ago
> Rent-regulated apartments, often the only homes in New York that people of modest means can afford, are vanishing as gentrification surges inexorably through the city’s neighborhoods Rent regulation in NYC is easily the least effective way to make housing affordable for people of "modest means". It's criticized even by advocates of affordable housing for this reason. The only reason it still exists is because there are a large number of tenants grandfathered into the system (over a third of all NYC tenants) and that makes for a formidable voting bloc. Rent control is all-but-gone - only a very small number of units are still eligible, and that's because the tenant has lived there continuously since 1975. Rent stabilization is less broken, but still horribly broken. Anybody can live in a rent-stabilized unit, regardless of whether or not they'd be able to afford the market rents, and there's no effort made to make those units available to people who can't afford market rents. There are plenty of other programs in NYC, like Mitchell-Lama, which are much more effective at providing affordable housing. Rent regulation is not one of them.
- busterarm 8y ago
  > since 1975 Early 1970, actually. > Anybody can live in a rent-stabilized unit, regardless of whether or not they'd be able to afford the market rents, and there's no effort made to make those units available to people who can't afford market rents. But there is a strong effort to eliminate these units. Most of the rent stabilized inventory is not in desirable places to live. The rent can be increased every two years. The rent guidelines board has voted for a freeze only one time in its 49 year history. On average the increase is 2% every vote and two increases of about 7.5% in the last 5 years. This interest compounds, obviously and also scales up MCI rent increases for capital improvements. Once your rent hits $2700/mo, you are no longer stabilized. If you actually work out some examples, you'll find from this chart that rent stabilized tenants have had their rent increased _at minimum_ by roughly 34% for two-year leases in the last decade. If your landlord is anything like mine, it's probably close to 45%. http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/rentguidelinesboard/pdf/guidelines/aptorders2018.pdf http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/rentguidelinesboard/pdf/guideline...
  - chimeracoder 8y ago
kyrieeschaton 8y ago
"Regulatory capture? What's that?"
- wavefunction 8y ago
  "Nobody said freedom and Democracy were easy. You don't get to coast, enjoying the fruits of all the hard labor that brought us to this point. You have to maintain your institutions lest criminal elements in the corporate world or elsewhere gain power." Who are we quoting again?
busterarm 8y ago
I loved how NYC landlords sought a 7% increase on rent stabilized apartments and the RGB voted them a 7.4% increase instead. Meanwhile the vacancy rate on rent-stabilized apartments over $2000/mo is 7.42%...
jakelarkin 8y ago
certainly its also dysfunctional that we legislate that random property owners must provide the safety net for the poor & elderly.
- forapurpose 8y ago
  > random property owners must provide the safety net ... Whenever someone says 'it's unfair that I must provide these social benefits', let's recall the enormous amount of social benefits that each of us receives, especially in developed countries: Security, safety, a system of laws, roads, education, food supply, healthcare, sanitation, infrastructure built by generations, rights, research on everything from health to history to gas fracking to something once called APRAnet, etc etc. And then there are the benefits each industry and many private companies obtain from government, licitly and otherwise. We all benefit more than we ever can repay. So yes, optimally the costs should be distributed in a very systematic, fair way. But at the same time my general response is: stop whining when asked to pull your weight a little.
  - crooked-v 8y ago
    Presumably the point is that the government should be providing the safety net and leveraging economies of scale to do so, and have commensurate taxes, rather than requiring individual landlords to handle the details themselves.
  - darawk 8y ago
    > We all benefit more than we ever can repay. So yes, optimally the costs should be distributed in a very systematic, fair way. But at the same time my general response is: stop whining when asked to pull your weight a little. That's not really how this works. You don't arbitrarily force property owners to bear the full cost of supporting these people. If society deems them worthy of support, then society should support them. If we collectively think these people shouldn't be forced from their homes, then great. Let's pay the delta between what we think their rent ought to be and what the market price for that rent is. Let's all pay it together. Randomly and capriciously forcing whoever happens to own that property at the time to foot the bill is short sighted and silly.
chatmasta 8y ago
The worst aspect of high rent costs in cities is that it forces a long commute on the poorest residents. Those are the people who could benefit the most from extra time in their day. These blue collar workers, who basically run their city, have to live outside it and spend hours each day commuting into it after a short night’s sleep. The long term health effects of such a routine are terrible, and even worse for families.
- busterarm 8y ago
  This is by design. You can't keep a class of people poor if you give them the time in their day and resources to think about how to not be poor. And somebody must be poor for society to function. (If you're reading this and are hitting that downvote button, I hope you realize that nobody could seriously be advocating that this is the way things should be. But if this statement makes you that uncomfortable, I did my job.)
  - cowpig 8y ago
    I think you're probably getting downvoted for making the claim that > somebody must be poor for society to function
    - busterarm 8y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAmL3F5uylo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAmL3F5uylo I mean, if you can show me any significant society in human history without a servant/working/slave class though, I'll buy you a cookie. A really big cookie.
  - throwaway2048 8y ago
    If soceity must have poor for it to function, as you claim. Nobody should feel bad about opressive actions towards poor people, or be concerned about making their lot better. Right?
    - busterarm 8y ago
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
Meh. This sucks but what can you do. When you have a government where corruption and dysfunction is is tolerated or expected in some parts (police and MTA come to mind) that dysfunction inevitably seeps in everywhere else given the time. As another commenter said the big real estate companies have the resources to work the system until they get what they want so as long as the system supports sloppy decision making and incompetence they can just work the system until they get the desired result. Sure this is bad but it's not gonna change until the politicans apply pressure. They won't do that unless someone with connections gets screwed and makes it their mission to right the wrongs or something thrusts the issue into the public eye. It will probably take someone going postal for this to be thrust into the public eye because the people being screwed are mostly poor and nobody cares about what poor people do unless there's violence involved. Without the politicians to applying pressure no change will happen and they won't apply pressure unless this affects people with connections or provokes outrage. Unfortunately that's just how these sorts of governments usually work.
profalseidol 8y ago
It should also say 'similary to nytimes'
kevin_b_er 8y ago
Large corporations have more resources than you. They will always attempt to abuse the system to extract money from you or to abuse you. Hopefully the NY Times names and shames these crimelords and their companies.
beisner 8y ago
I'm curious, and maybe this is not the right forum for this kind of discussion, but it seems to me at some level there's going to be a tradeoff between the ability of current tenants to afford their current housing and newcomers to afford housing. In markets like NYC, where demand is ever-increasing and for various reasons supply cannot keep up with demand, maintaining rent-controlled apartments necessarily drives prices higher overall. This prices a large group of people (especially the working-class young) out of the market. At the same time, were landlords allowed to adjust to market at-will, people who potentially have lived in a community for decades could be displaced without notice. Both situations are undesirable, since it would seem that someone gets screwed either way. I've been wondering this for a while, but haven't come up with a satisfying answer: to what extent do people have the right to live in a given community? Does this depend on if people have lived in a community for some time? Does it only depend on whether they can afford to live there? I feel like these questions aren't black and white, but there's also no clear middle part I feel comfortable committing to.
- busterarm 8y ago
  Maybe New York City doesn't really need any more middle-class suburban white twenty/thirty-somethings.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- majormajor 8y ago
  I'd ask a slightly different question: why is so much of our economic policy centered around new and higher paying jobs in a certain area, in disconnect with the current residents preferences for housing policy? It seems like these things are controlled by very different interests that end up fighting in ways that treat the non-high-income/wealthy existing residents as collateral damage. We want housing to be more affordable in LA, [a different but still local] we also want Amazon to come to town and bring in a bunch of new workers from out of town. Those two goals seems hard to reconcile.
  - 8y ago
AnimalMuppet 8y ago
More generally: When you give the government more power, you can expect the powerful to try to use it. What? You thought that power was going to be used on behalf of the powerless? That may have been the stated intent. But the powerful tend to know how to use power better than the powerless do...
- gowld 8y ago
  And if you don't give the government more powerful, you can expect the powerful to grow their power unchecked.
  - taysic 8y ago
    Not at all - the gov often concentrates power because they make the laws. This is what happens in regulatory capture - a company can ensure themselves a monopoly / advantages through the right laws in a way they could never guarantee in the free market.
pg_bot 8y ago
This is what happens when you have rent control in your city. Residents who are lucky enough to live in under market housing become reluctant to move as they will be unlikely to receive another apartment at the rate they currently pay. Landlords have no reason to invest money back into buildings if they cannot recoup the investment. Rent control is bad public policy and should go the way of the dodo.[0] [0] http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/rent-control http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/rent-control
- busterarm 8y ago
  The data in NY shows pretty clearly that buildings with significant amount of stabilized and controlled units get an outsized share of Major Capital Improvements because that is the way you get your units to cross the stabilization threshold.
  - darawk 8y ago
    Can I get a source on that? Asking honestly, i'm curious about how that might work.
    - busterarm 8y ago
      I'll have to find it again but the MCI increase rate is capped at 6%/yr for stabilized tenants for this very reason. My landlord has hit between 4.8% and 6% every year without exception since 1991...for what? Besides the lobby I can't tell.
      - DrScump 8y ago
        I would think that 27 years of such capital investment, if genuine, would result in some tangible, visible effect.
  - pg_bot 8y ago
    Your statement is not inconsistent with mine. This is economics 101, price controls act the same way with housing as they do with oil. If those apartments could not be converted to the market rate, the investment would not be made. Market rate housing invests money over a longer period of time instead of a short burst.
davidf18 8y ago
High cost of rent in NYC (where I live) but also SF, LA, Boston, DC, London is because of rent-seeking -- in this case zoning density restrictions which makes land scarce. Rent-seeking in this case is using politics to shift wealth toward special interests such as wealthy landlords, Donald Trump as a Prime example. Ironically, it is a Democratic City council in NYC which helped DT become so wealthy. Japan fixed the problem with federal housing policy that doesn't allow local jurisdictions to create rent-seeking zoning density restrictions. See Harvard Economist Edward Glaeser: Build Big, Bill http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/build-big-bill-article-1.1913739 http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/build-big-bill-article-1....
StanislavPetrov 8y ago
This entire problem can be explained with one line from the above essay: >Punishable conduct is rarely punished. As long as judges allow landlords to break the law without facing serious sanctions, they will continue to do so. Its the same behavior that encourages police officers to perjure themselves constantly on the stand and prosecutors to hide evidence and perform other misconduct in the pursuit of criminal convictions. In many cases throughout society, unfortunately, the law has become nothing more than a tool for the wealthy and powerful to punish and control the poor and powerless. Anyone interested in reading an excellent book on this subject should check out Glenn Greenwald's With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful.
misiti3780 8y ago
I live in a Croman building now in the LES, it has been absolute tell since he bought in 3 years ago.
toomanybeersies 8y ago
A similar thing has happened in New Zealand. The Tenancy Tribunal exists to mediate disputes between the landlord and tenants, both the landlord and the tenant can bring cases. For example, landlords can use it to get tenants to pay for damage caused, and tenants can use it to get the landlord to fix something they are legally obliged to fix. The tribunal is non-biased, and the decisions they make tend to be fair. The problem though is that all tenancy tribunal case are public. With the names of the tenants and landlords published, as well as the case and the outcome. A lot of rental applications ask if you have ever been to the tenancy tribunal, and a lot of real estate agents will search the tribunal records (which go back 5 years) when you apply for a rental. It doesn't matter if you were in the right or wrong, or if you won or lost. Landlords are reluctant to rent to anybody that has been to the tribunal, as they are considered troublemakers. Because of this, tenants are scared to go to the tribunal, even for justified cases, where they are in the right and would win. The opposite doesn't occur for landlords because there is more demand than supply for tenants, and also tenants often don't know that they can search the tribunal records.
cascom 8y ago
Not mentioned here - the imputed cost of easy eviction on rental prices/ability to rent. I’ve lived in tenant friendly cities (NYC) and landlord friendly cities (HOU). And guess what, its way easier to rent an apartment in a state where it’s easier to get evicted. Perversely making it hard to evict a tennat can make the hurdles to be being able to qualify for an apartment to high for many people. I’m not saying that there should be no protections, and as a renter i would prefer to have stronger protections, but with those stronger protections come costs....
mrslave 8y ago
Tomas Sowell's Basic Economics has a chapter on the failures of rent control, specifically addressing New York City (among others). These controls suffocate supply and now the owners of an artificially scarce basic resource have a lot of power. It's not exactly a surprise.

132 points by danso 8y ago

Even if a case is shown to be baseless, just being sued can hurt a tenant’s ability to rent a new apartment. We have this list, we have credit score lists, CLUE, and even sex offenders lists... How about one more: The "I'm a cartoon villain" list. If you, for example, evict a little old lady in your greed for more rent even though your net worth exceeds some given amount, you get added straight to the list. Because that's cartoon level villainy right there. That should follow you for life.

sigstoat 8y ago
if the property is owned by a REIT, which is itself owned largely by retirees, who exactly goes on the list? (i just looked up a bunch of major REITs, and only EQR, Equity Residential, has >1% ownership by insiders. despite that, it has ~96% institutional ownership, with vanguard at 14.4%.)
- ryanobjc 8y ago
  This is the right answer, because ownership of property and rental income has become securitized and made in to these complex financial instruments. The real work has gotten very complex indeed.
  - dd36 8y ago
    Automated greed. It's like a block chain where nobody is really in charge.
- noonespecial 8y ago
  As tempting as it is to just completely diffuse the blame and claim its "nobody" or "the system", there are humans at the tip of the spear. Even if its just the lawyers who choose to take the case or the muscle who shows up to do the eviction. "I'm just doing my job" when you're obviously taking a helpless old lady's home factors out to "I knew it was wrong, I just did it for the money". Our loss of shame as a society and as individuals is truly dumbfounding.
  - perl4ever 8y ago
    Sounds like you might be interested in David Hogg's boycott of Vanguard, albeit for different reasons. To me, it's just tilting at windmills, but that seems to be becoming more popular these days.

Regardsyjc 8y ago

Evictions destabilize neighborhoods and ruin lives. Evicted by Matthew Desmond is a great book on this issue. It is infuriating some of the predatory, senseless, ruthless, scumbag business practices that slum lords use and crazy to discover that this is a recent development starting from the 60s. Also shout out to Justfix.nyc, a startup using tech to tackle this issue. One of their projects is this website they made to help. https://www.evictionfreenyc.org https://www.evictionfreenyc.org

chiefalchemist 8y ago
I read Evicted. Great book! A must read. Word of advice to anyone who picks it up. Read the final chapter or two first. It's where he gets into the weeds of the data and such. If you start at the beginning and get bored, get distracted, give up, etc. before the end you're going to miss the best part. Don't get me wrong, the stories are great. But just the same it gets disheartening, if not depressing.
- Khol 8y ago
  I read this over christmas and was completely engrossed (to the extent of being borderline antisocial). I can certainly understand how you might find it disheartening and depressing, but I don't know I could quite see bored. The retelling of the situations was captivating, and the descriptions of how the system fails those most in need was harrowing at times. I've been recommending it to anyone who will listen.
  - chiefalchemist 8y ago
    I'm not saying __I__ got bored :) However, the truth is, plenty of books get started and are never finished. Since the bit at the end was so factually important to the discussion of the issue, I didn't want that to be missed. Imho, he should have started there.
    - Khol 8y ago
      I'm certainly guilty of getting partway through books and never returning, but I don't know that if I'd jumped into the data first I would have been so engrossed. (Obviously this is entirely a personal perspective.)

RickJWagner 8y ago

I wonder if the Orbach Group has any ties to Jerry Orbach, 'Lenny' from Law and Order and the father figure in 'Dirty Dancing'.

paulie_a 8y ago
Fun fact he was known as "Mr Broadway" in his early career he performed in numerous shows. Completely off topic but that really was the golden era of law and order

chiefalchemist 8y ago

The truth is, big real estate companies have the resources and the incentive to be aggressive. But perhaps that's the root of the problem? With so many units at below market rates, the current new to the market units get priced to cover the "loss" of the controlled units? And then of course there's the incentive. I'm not defending the practice. But I am suggesting - similar to housing and a college edu - that "government intervention" often has unintended consequences.

knuththetruth 8y ago
The government intervenes on behalf of Global Capital in the housing market all the time, allowing them to turn a basic necessity (shelter) into a vehicle for things like international money-laundering and finacialized speculation. These are the circumstances that have created the housing crisis we have now and previously took down the entire economy. I’m confused as to why you single out trying to intervene on behalf of the average person over the wealthy as the source of the problem when the “free market” term setting has caused the massive distortions and unaffordablity.
- ryanobjc 8y ago
  Common myth of the 'free market' - the reality is the market is totally constrained in many ways by the political and legal system. There is definitely something very 'i am very smart'-like about tech nerds defending 'the market' against any attempts of humanizing life. "um, actually the free market will..." Governments exist to provide super-market force. Safety regulation being kind of a prime example, especially for employees. OSHA is anti-free market -- there should be no safety regulations, and let employees the freedom to choose safety or pay and let the free market work it out. Right?
  - pitaj 8y ago
    The market is very good at allocating resources, setting prices, and meeting demand. Countries with freer economies like Switzerland and Hong Kong have higher standard of living on average. Countries which free up their economies have higher relative standards of living after doing so. Countries which oppress their economies have lower relative standards of living after doing so. (By relative, I mean relative to the growth rates of neighboring countries and before the changes, as standards of living rarely decrease absolutely).

chimeracoder 8y ago

> Rent-regulated apartments, often the only homes in New York that people of modest means can afford, are vanishing as gentrification surges inexorably through the city’s neighborhoods Rent regulation in NYC is easily the least effective way to make housing affordable for people of "modest means". It's criticized even by advocates of affordable housing for this reason. The only reason it still exists is because there are a large number of tenants grandfathered into the system (over a third of all NYC tenants) and that makes for a formidable voting bloc. Rent control is all-but-gone - only a very small number of units are still eligible, and that's because the tenant has lived there continuously since 1975. Rent stabilization is less broken, but still horribly broken. Anybody can live in a rent-stabilized unit, regardless of whether or not they'd be able to afford the market rents, and there's no effort made to make those units available to people who can't afford market rents. There are plenty of other programs in NYC, like Mitchell-Lama, which are much more effective at providing affordable housing. Rent regulation is not one of them.

busterarm 8y ago
> since 1975 Early 1970, actually. > Anybody can live in a rent-stabilized unit, regardless of whether or not they'd be able to afford the market rents, and there's no effort made to make those units available to people who can't afford market rents. But there is a strong effort to eliminate these units. Most of the rent stabilized inventory is not in desirable places to live. The rent can be increased every two years. The rent guidelines board has voted for a freeze only one time in its 49 year history. On average the increase is 2% every vote and two increases of about 7.5% in the last 5 years. This interest compounds, obviously and also scales up MCI rent increases for capital improvements. Once your rent hits $2700/mo, you are no longer stabilized. If you actually work out some examples, you'll find from this chart that rent stabilized tenants have had their rent increased _at minimum_ by roughly 34% for two-year leases in the last decade. If your landlord is anything like mine, it's probably close to 45%. http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/rentguidelinesboard/pdf/guidelines/aptorders2018.pdf http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/rentguidelinesboard/pdf/guideline...
- chimeracoder 8y ago

kyrieeschaton 8y ago

"Regulatory capture? What's that?"

wavefunction 8y ago
"Nobody said freedom and Democracy were easy. You don't get to coast, enjoying the fruits of all the hard labor that brought us to this point. You have to maintain your institutions lest criminal elements in the corporate world or elsewhere gain power." Who are we quoting again?

busterarm 8y ago

I loved how NYC landlords sought a 7% increase on rent stabilized apartments and the RGB voted them a 7.4% increase instead. Meanwhile the vacancy rate on rent-stabilized apartments over $2000/mo is 7.42%...

jakelarkin 8y ago

certainly its also dysfunctional that we legislate that random property owners must provide the safety net for the poor & elderly.

forapurpose 8y ago
> random property owners must provide the safety net ... Whenever someone says 'it's unfair that I must provide these social benefits', let's recall the enormous amount of social benefits that each of us receives, especially in developed countries: Security, safety, a system of laws, roads, education, food supply, healthcare, sanitation, infrastructure built by generations, rights, research on everything from health to history to gas fracking to something once called APRAnet, etc etc. And then there are the benefits each industry and many private companies obtain from government, licitly and otherwise. We all benefit more than we ever can repay. So yes, optimally the costs should be distributed in a very systematic, fair way. But at the same time my general response is: stop whining when asked to pull your weight a little.
- crooked-v 8y ago
  Presumably the point is that the government should be providing the safety net and leveraging economies of scale to do so, and have commensurate taxes, rather than requiring individual landlords to handle the details themselves.
- darawk 8y ago
  > We all benefit more than we ever can repay. So yes, optimally the costs should be distributed in a very systematic, fair way. But at the same time my general response is: stop whining when asked to pull your weight a little. That's not really how this works. You don't arbitrarily force property owners to bear the full cost of supporting these people. If society deems them worthy of support, then society should support them. If we collectively think these people shouldn't be forced from their homes, then great. Let's pay the delta between what we think their rent ought to be and what the market price for that rent is. Let's all pay it together. Randomly and capriciously forcing whoever happens to own that property at the time to foot the bill is short sighted and silly.

chatmasta 8y ago

The worst aspect of high rent costs in cities is that it forces a long commute on the poorest residents. Those are the people who could benefit the most from extra time in their day. These blue collar workers, who basically run their city, have to live outside it and spend hours each day commuting into it after a short night’s sleep. The long term health effects of such a routine are terrible, and even worse for families.

busterarm 8y ago
This is by design. You can't keep a class of people poor if you give them the time in their day and resources to think about how to not be poor. And somebody must be poor for society to function. (If you're reading this and are hitting that downvote button, I hope you realize that nobody could seriously be advocating that this is the way things should be. But if this statement makes you that uncomfortable, I did my job.)
- cowpig 8y ago
  I think you're probably getting downvoted for making the claim that > somebody must be poor for society to function
  - busterarm 8y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAmL3F5uylo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAmL3F5uylo I mean, if you can show me any significant society in human history without a servant/working/slave class though, I'll buy you a cookie. A really big cookie.
- throwaway2048 8y ago
  If soceity must have poor for it to function, as you claim. Nobody should feel bad about opressive actions towards poor people, or be concerned about making their lot better. Right?
  - busterarm 8y ago

dsfyu404ed 8y ago

Meh. This sucks but what can you do. When you have a government where corruption and dysfunction is is tolerated or expected in some parts (police and MTA come to mind) that dysfunction inevitably seeps in everywhere else given the time. As another commenter said the big real estate companies have the resources to work the system until they get what they want so as long as the system supports sloppy decision making and incompetence they can just work the system until they get the desired result. Sure this is bad but it's not gonna change until the politicans apply pressure. They won't do that unless someone with connections gets screwed and makes it their mission to right the wrongs or something thrusts the issue into the public eye. It will probably take someone going postal for this to be thrust into the public eye because the people being screwed are mostly poor and nobody cares about what poor people do unless there's violence involved. Without the politicians to applying pressure no change will happen and they won't apply pressure unless this affects people with connections or provokes outrage. Unfortunately that's just how these sorts of governments usually work.

profalseidol 8y ago

It should also say 'similary to nytimes'

kevin_b_er 8y ago

Large corporations have more resources than you. They will always attempt to abuse the system to extract money from you or to abuse you. Hopefully the NY Times names and shames these crimelords and their companies.

beisner 8y ago

I'm curious, and maybe this is not the right forum for this kind of discussion, but it seems to me at some level there's going to be a tradeoff between the ability of current tenants to afford their current housing and newcomers to afford housing. In markets like NYC, where demand is ever-increasing and for various reasons supply cannot keep up with demand, maintaining rent-controlled apartments necessarily drives prices higher overall. This prices a large group of people (especially the working-class young) out of the market. At the same time, were landlords allowed to adjust to market at-will, people who potentially have lived in a community for decades could be displaced without notice. Both situations are undesirable, since it would seem that someone gets screwed either way. I've been wondering this for a while, but haven't come up with a satisfying answer: to what extent do people have the right to live in a given community? Does this depend on if people have lived in a community for some time? Does it only depend on whether they can afford to live there? I feel like these questions aren't black and white, but there's also no clear middle part I feel comfortable committing to.

busterarm 8y ago
Maybe New York City doesn't really need any more middle-class suburban white twenty/thirty-somethings.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
majormajor 8y ago
I'd ask a slightly different question: why is so much of our economic policy centered around new and higher paying jobs in a certain area, in disconnect with the current residents preferences for housing policy? It seems like these things are controlled by very different interests that end up fighting in ways that treat the non-high-income/wealthy existing residents as collateral damage. We want housing to be more affordable in LA, [a different but still local] we also want Amazon to come to town and bring in a bunch of new workers from out of town. Those two goals seems hard to reconcile.
- 8y ago

AnimalMuppet 8y ago

More generally: When you give the government more power, you can expect the powerful to try to use it. What? You thought that power was going to be used on behalf of the powerless? That may have been the stated intent. But the powerful tend to know how to use power better than the powerless do...

gowld 8y ago
And if you don't give the government more powerful, you can expect the powerful to grow their power unchecked.
- taysic 8y ago
  Not at all - the gov often concentrates power because they make the laws. This is what happens in regulatory capture - a company can ensure themselves a monopoly / advantages through the right laws in a way they could never guarantee in the free market.

pg_bot 8y ago

This is what happens when you have rent control in your city. Residents who are lucky enough to live in under market housing become reluctant to move as they will be unlikely to receive another apartment at the rate they currently pay. Landlords have no reason to invest money back into buildings if they cannot recoup the investment. Rent control is bad public policy and should go the way of the dodo.[0] [0] http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/rent-control http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/rent-control

busterarm 8y ago
The data in NY shows pretty clearly that buildings with significant amount of stabilized and controlled units get an outsized share of Major Capital Improvements because that is the way you get your units to cross the stabilization threshold.
- darawk 8y ago
  Can I get a source on that? Asking honestly, i'm curious about how that might work.
  - busterarm 8y ago
    I'll have to find it again but the MCI increase rate is capped at 6%/yr for stabilized tenants for this very reason. My landlord has hit between 4.8% and 6% every year without exception since 1991...for what? Besides the lobby I can't tell.
    - DrScump 8y ago
      I would think that 27 years of such capital investment, if genuine, would result in some tangible, visible effect.
- pg_bot 8y ago
  Your statement is not inconsistent with mine. This is economics 101, price controls act the same way with housing as they do with oil. If those apartments could not be converted to the market rate, the investment would not be made. Market rate housing invests money over a longer period of time instead of a short burst.

davidf18 8y ago

High cost of rent in NYC (where I live) but also SF, LA, Boston, DC, London is because of rent-seeking -- in this case zoning density restrictions which makes land scarce. Rent-seeking in this case is using politics to shift wealth toward special interests such as wealthy landlords, Donald Trump as a Prime example. Ironically, it is a Democratic City council in NYC which helped DT become so wealthy. Japan fixed the problem with federal housing policy that doesn't allow local jurisdictions to create rent-seeking zoning density restrictions. See Harvard Economist Edward Glaeser: Build Big, Bill http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/build-big-bill-article-1.1913739 http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/build-big-bill-article-1....

StanislavPetrov 8y ago

This entire problem can be explained with one line from the above essay: >Punishable conduct is rarely punished. As long as judges allow landlords to break the law without facing serious sanctions, they will continue to do so. Its the same behavior that encourages police officers to perjure themselves constantly on the stand and prosecutors to hide evidence and perform other misconduct in the pursuit of criminal convictions. In many cases throughout society, unfortunately, the law has become nothing more than a tool for the wealthy and powerful to punish and control the poor and powerless. Anyone interested in reading an excellent book on this subject should check out Glenn Greenwald's With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful.

misiti3780 8y ago

I live in a Croman building now in the LES, it has been absolute tell since he bought in 3 years ago.

toomanybeersies 8y ago

A similar thing has happened in New Zealand. The Tenancy Tribunal exists to mediate disputes between the landlord and tenants, both the landlord and the tenant can bring cases. For example, landlords can use it to get tenants to pay for damage caused, and tenants can use it to get the landlord to fix something they are legally obliged to fix. The tribunal is non-biased, and the decisions they make tend to be fair. The problem though is that all tenancy tribunal case are public. With the names of the tenants and landlords published, as well as the case and the outcome. A lot of rental applications ask if you have ever been to the tenancy tribunal, and a lot of real estate agents will search the tribunal records (which go back 5 years) when you apply for a rental. It doesn't matter if you were in the right or wrong, or if you won or lost. Landlords are reluctant to rent to anybody that has been to the tribunal, as they are considered troublemakers. Because of this, tenants are scared to go to the tribunal, even for justified cases, where they are in the right and would win. The opposite doesn't occur for landlords because there is more demand than supply for tenants, and also tenants often don't know that they can search the tribunal records.

cascom 8y ago

Not mentioned here - the imputed cost of easy eviction on rental prices/ability to rent. I’ve lived in tenant friendly cities (NYC) and landlord friendly cities (HOU). And guess what, its way easier to rent an apartment in a state where it’s easier to get evicted. Perversely making it hard to evict a tennat can make the hurdles to be being able to qualify for an apartment to high for many people. I’m not saying that there should be no protections, and as a renter i would prefer to have stronger protections, but with those stronger protections come costs....

mrslave 8y ago

Tomas Sowell's Basic Economics has a chapter on the failures of rent control, specifically addressing New York City (among others). These controls suffocate supply and now the owners of an artificially scarce basic resource have a lot of power. It's not exactly a surprise.