7 ms·

One of the less talked about aspects of rent stabilized apartments is how people become trapped in them. I know people who have been living in rent stabilized

• otoburb 3y ago
  >>Of course, it is hard to feel sorry for someone living in a $1,200/mo 1-bedroom in a nice area in Manhattan. Right -- that's not a trap; it's a choice.
  • porkbeer 3y ago
    But what choice could compete with that? It's a hell of a decision to relinquish such a situatuon.
    • jeffbee 3y ago
      But by this definition any situation that is optimal is "a trap".
      • huytersd 3y ago
        Well it has to be optimal and irreplaceable.
      • all2 3y ago
        In a way, yes. I suppose it depends on what you optimize for.
    • huytersd 3y ago
      I’m guessing you can’t Airbnb them?
      • kristjansson 3y ago
        No, government doesn't really love it when you profit off welfare programs.
        • huytersd 3y ago
          What about having other extended family members live there? Or does it have to be the specific people on the original lease.
      • cantSpellSober 3y ago
        Short-term leases are now illegal, so everyone stopped doing it (just kidding, it created a huge black market). Harder than it used to be though. https://www.wired.com/story/airbnb-ban-new-york-illegal-listings/ https://www.wired.com/story/airbnb-ban-new-york-illegal-list...
• yardie 3y ago
  I feel the same for people with near 0% interest rate mortgages. Like we bought a starter home prior to the pandemic. Buying the same home now would be 3.5x the monthly mortgage payment. Buying a slightly nicer, 1 extra bedroom near our neighborhood is completely out of the question. Since no one wants to move because rates are so high it creates a vicious loop of more buyers than inventory on sale.
  • midasuni 3y ago
    Can you not port mortgages in America? I have 4 years left on my mortgage, if I want to move though I can simply sell this place, buy somewhere new, and phone up my mortgage company and take the debt with me - as long as the new place is about the same or more than the current place (so the LTV stays the same or better).
    • ghaff 3y ago
      Not typically AFAIK. The mortgage is secured by a specific piece of property which has been inspected, title-searched, etc. It's not a random unsecured loan. It's also the case in the US that you can generally just pay off the loan any time you want.
    • warriormonk5 3y ago
      Generically speaking no. There's some exceptions, USDA, VA, and FHA loans. All government programs. But it's tied to the property so only transferable to the purchaser. Very rare here even now with rates changing so much.
    • toast0 3y ago
      No, mortgage portability is not a thing in the US, at all. Mortgages are tied to the property and the borrowers. I've never heard of a (US) borrower being able to sell their property and keep the loan. Alternatively, it is sometimes possible for a new borrower to assume the previous mortgage, but it's up to lender discretion, and seems unlikely if a current mortgage would be at a dramatically higher rate. What does seem to happen often is that an owner who wants to move but doesn't want to lose their nice rate will move and then rent our their old place, or at least try to, it can be difficult to qualify for a new mortgage while carrying the old mortgage and not having a history of rent payments.
• user3939382 3y ago
  My friend has a rent controlled -- huge LR, kitchen, dining room, 2 hallways, 2 bedrooms, 1 bath, 18 foot ceilings, in low 80s upper east side. $500/month. I think his neighbor's rent is like $6500. Yeah he's not leaving.
  • bmitc 3y ago
    Living the high life, literally in terms of the ceilings. Having ceilings like that is so mind-blowing in a living space, as it opens everything up drastically. That is an insane rent. From the description, the size is great. What is the condition and quality of the place? And I'm not all that familiar with New York's neighborhoods. Is low 80s upper east side a good neighborhood?
    • OfSanguineFire 3y ago
      High ceilings mean flats also take a lot more energy to heat in winter. If heating were out of my own pocket, I might pass on a flat with high ceilings even if rent were attractively low. Do NYC blocks like the GP describes typically include heating in the rent?
      • FFP999 3y ago
        Probably more like, if you can afford the rent on a place like this, you're in a position where you don't even notice the heating bill.
      • kortilla 3y ago
        $6000/mo lower. Do you realize how much heat that buys?
      • mdhen 3y ago
        yes, old buildings will have central radiator heating and the heat is free. Very high probability the apartment in question has this.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
• chubot 3y ago
  I briefly lived in Manhattan, and I think my neighbor across the hall was in such a unique situation. The building was an old one in the center of Manhattan, but newly renovated. I moved in in 2021, and I think everybody had moved in within the last 5 years. There were a bunch of young professionals that had graduated from NYU and such. But this guy was the only one without the iPhone electronic lock on his door -- and good for him, the iPhone locks are a reason why I moved out of the building! (Unsurprisingly, the locks once malfunctioned and we were locked out of the building. Computers make everything work very poorly these days.) Anyway, I chatted with him in the elevator, and once asked when he moved in. I believe he said 1989 -- anyway, it was like 3 decades. He didn't look to be more than 40, so I guess he must have lived there as a child, and inherited the apartment. Also, whenever I talked to him, he would say something super political without prompting, like "Adams is fucking slob, under Giuliani we had law and order" or something. (Also, he was black, which may break your mental image a bit.)
  • pyrophane 3y ago
    Yeah, that all sounds about right! A bit of an aside because it sounds like he really did live there full-time, but another reason why people in RS units wouldn't want an phone-enabled lock on their door is it possibly gives the landlord information on how often they come and go. Some people who have units like that live somewhere else but just can't bring themselves to let the things go, so they use them as storage and go by once a week to check the mail.
    • dclowd9901 3y ago
      That would kind of suck too, wouldn't it? Like constantly being paranoid about the landlord up to some shenanigans to get your ass out?
  • the_doctah 3y ago
    What do his race and/or political leanings have to do with it?
• rpeden 3y ago
  I lived in a nice apartment building in Toronto from 2015-2020. One couple in the building had lived in the same rent-stabilized apartment there since 1967. On the bright side, it was a well-maintained building in a good neighborhood, so they had reasons to enjoy it being just the price.
• cantSpellSober 3y ago
  Do you mean rent stablized specifically vs controlled? About 1% of NYC apartments are rent controlled, about 50% are rent stabilized. In controlled units you might see a minor increase over time, but generally you're paying what the unit was priced at 50 years ago. Leaving typically means an increase in rent of 500-700%, and these are practically impossible for new tenants to get. In stablized units the rent can only be increased by a percentage determined by a board, typically 2-3% a year.
  • busterarm 3y ago
    Former rent-controlled apartment dweller here. That's not true. Stabilized units can increase something like 4% a year, up until they hit the threshold that takes them out of stabilization. Controlled units can increase 2% every two years and historically did not do so from the 90s until a few years ago where increases have been happening and the housing board has advocated on behalf of landlords for additional/emergency increases. Rent increases can happen completely separate from this process through building improvements and from the late 80s through to the early 2000s, my landlord managed to add $700 onto our controlled rent through really shady/shoddy/fake building improvements. Growing up about 80% of the units in the building were rent-controlled and when I left there was was only 1 controlled unit left after mine. Nobody in my family, even though they all still live in NYC, wanted to take over the apartment. Most controlled apartment renters die and have nobody eligible to take them over (an immediate family member has to cohabitate for like 2 years with the renter). The number remaining across all of NYC is exceedingly small, like under 15000. There are ~4 million housing units in NYC. Rent-controlled apartments are true unicorns. But close to 75% are stabilized. They would do shit like slap a coat of primer on the hallways and add $50/mo in permanent rent to everyone's bill (90 unit building).
    • cantSpellSober 3y ago
      Emphasis on "might" and "generally" in the OP :) > my landlord managed to add $700 onto our controlled rent through really shady/shoddy/fake building improvements Ugh, your story is not uncommon sadly.
    • 3y ago
• busterarm 3y ago
  I had a rent controlled apartment in Midtown for ~$1300/mo. It's the apartment I grew up in and I finally got fed up and left two years ago. The landlord put giant holes in my floor to get access to some pipes and wouldn't fix them for over a year. After leaving the landlord tried to bill tens of thousands of dollars to bring the apartment up to their current standards -- even though we'd been in there since 1970 and the landlord never spent a cent on modernizing the apartment along the way. 100% of the renovations and upgrades we did ourselves. The apartment was left in great condition. I completely agree with you that it's a trap. The place made me completely miserable and even though at the end I finally earned decent money to leave, I chose to leave the city entirely. Best decision of my life.
  • pmarreck 3y ago
    > rent controlled apartment in Midtown for ~$1300/mo > landlord tried to bill tens of thousands of dollars to bring the apartment up to their current standards > landlord never spent a cent on modernizing the apartment along the way Surely you see that these are directly connected. With an increasing cost of living and a legally fixed profitability per month that isn't going up over time nor keeping up with inflation, from the landlord's perspective, there's little to no incentive for them to fork over cash they never got from the apartment to put back into it. At that point the only incentive is to hold onto the property itself and wait for its value to increase while deducting depreciation, and perversely, they are incentivized to make you as uncomfortable as possible since they cannot raise the rent on the unit until you move. It's my opinion that if we want rent control, there should be a cap on the amount of time that ends sooner than "on death", especially if you're not old. (For old people who are basically living in the last unit of their lives, it makes sense to me to rent-control those).
    • hoseja 3y ago
      Sure. But also Land Value Tax.
    • busterarm 3y ago
      > Surely you see that these are directly connected. With an increasing cost of living and a legally fixed profitability per month that isn't going up over time nor keeping up with inflation, from the landlord's perspective, there's little to no incentive for them to fork over cash they never got from the apartment to put back into it. At that point the only incentive is to hold onto the property itself and wait for its value to increase while deducting depreciation, and perversely, they are incentivized to make you as uncomfortable as possible since they cannot raise the rent on the unit until you move. Sure and we also stayed and maintained the building and the landlord's property through the 70s and 80s when New York was a cess pit. My neighborhood was famous for petty crime and was full of pimps, street hookers, bums and scammers -- New York was half empty compared to now. My landlord still had their property because of tenants like us who stayed when life in NY was grim. I was just around the corner from a building famous for the landlord trying to burn the tenants out (The Windermere). Also what the landlord was doing by not completing the repair was illegal. Fineable. Slumlordish. Having a 2' round, 1' deep hole in the doorway of my bathroom floor is a massive safety issue. You're saying my landlord shouldn't be required to repair it because of incentive? If I fell in their hole and hit my head on the toilet and died, they would have a multi-million dollar liability on their hands.
• vkou 3y ago
  I think most people 'trapped' in a rent-stabilized apartment would prefer it to homelessness. I understand this may make the neighbours feel jealous, but hey, I'm jealous of my neighbour who bought his house for 1/3rd of what I paid for mine... Life's not fair.