By Richard Lanzarone, Ann Heaney-Korchak and Lisa Damiani
On his first day in office, New York City Mayor Mamdani headed to 85 Clarkson St. in Brooklyn to start his “Rental Ripoff” tour, where he went apartment to apartment showing press and his social media following collapsing ceilings, crumbling plaster walls, broken bathtubs and unspeakable squalid conditions.
The building in Mamdani’s first day exposé was a bankrupt rent-stabilized building, scheduled to be auctioned off in a few days; while visiting, he ordered his housing agency to initiate legal action to stop the bankruptcy sale. Then he got his first lesson.
When the city correspondingly filed suit in federal court, the city’s own attorney in their brief unwittingly admitted that the low rents – enforced by rent-stabilized regulations – mean the owners of the building cannot support its upkeep and expenses. As they write in their brief, given its current income stream, the “building might fall into even greater disrepair and the burden for addressing emergency repairs might fall upon the City” leading to “a state of financial and social chaos … and it is predictable that such displaced tenants may need to seek shelter at great human cost and at the City’s expense.”
This admission begs the question: is this truly a case of a “bad landlord”, or does the city’s admission reveal that it is actually the state’s system of rent control that has systematically starved the building of the funds necessary to keep it afloat and keep tenants in safe, clean, and livable conditions?
Given that the building cannot support itself on an ongoing basis, since 2019, state rent control laws confirmed that there is no criteria for removing the rent-stabilized tag from apartments, how could it possibly afford the now millions of additional investment dollars needed to bring the building back to a state of habitability?
It can’t, and the building is doomed, in a state of irreparable disrepair and all its tenants will soon be displaced and forced to confront a housing market with vacancy rates sitting around 1.4%. And this is a problem repeating itself across New York, pushing housing stock even lower.
This is rent control’s endgame: the destruction and loss of buildings, displacement and homelessness. In the State Legislature’s progressive zeal in 2019 to return rent control laws back to their oppressive 1974 version, buildings are not burning down as they did in the ’70s, they are just crumbling down around the tenants. The results are the same.
Code enforcement can’t work in these financial conditions. This building is a canary in the coal mine as the number of New York buildings in a state of squalor has skyrocketed, particularly since 2019, with now over 300,000 NYC bankrupt rent-stabilized apartments and growing.
Enter the REST Act, a bill currently sponsored in the Assembly by Democratic Socialist Sarahana Shrestha. The REST Act seeks to spread this destruction of housing far and wide across New York state’s upstate cities by making it easy for upstate municipalities to adopt the failed policy of NYC rent control.
In addition to the deterioration of tenants’ living conditions, rent regulation drives away those who would build the additional housing that would actually lower costs through competition.
This was shown recently when St. Paul, Minnesota, adopted rent control. Builders put their pencils down and moved en masse across the river to Minneapolis, where a building boom kept rents in check.
The governor’s solution of “Let Them Build” is the solution to lowering housing costs, as cities like Austin, Phoenix and locally in New Rochelle have shown. In some cases, rents have even lowered.
The State legislature should reject additional regulations that strangle the housing market, reject the REST Act, and get behind the governor’s plan to cut red tape and produce more housing.
Kingston and other upstate cities should take heed of Mayor Mamdani’s hard lesson and look warily at NYC ideas that pose as solutions to upstate problems.
Richard Lanzarone is Executive Director of the Housing Providers of New York State. Ann Heaney-Korchak is Board President of Small Property Owners of New York. Lisa Damiani is Executive Director of the Western New York Property Owners Association.
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