When the city’s Rent Guidelines Board votes Monday on adjustments for one- and two-year leases of rent-stabilized apartments, it must tune out the politics — and increase rents at the highest end of the preliminary range they set last month.
The math, and the health of New York City’s housing stock, demands it.
The RGB’s own research data and reports show that a minimum rent increase of 6.3% is necessary for small-property owners to meet their increased operating costs and expenses.
But the board ignored its own math last month when it set a preliminary adjustment range of 1.75% to 4.75% for a one-year lease.
They have a chance to make it right — by voting for the higher number.
Independent housing policy experts at the Citizens Budget Commission and NYU Furman Center warn that decades of rent adjustments failing to keep pace with inflation and rising costs have taken a heavy toll, and the pattern is no longer sustainable.
Too many buildings, they say, are in economic distress.
Just look at the staggering number of mom-and-pop, family-owned buildings in last month’s Department of Finance lien sale.
Those buildings are now in danger of foreclosure, abandonment or takeover by corporate landlords and predatory profiteers.
It’s simple math.
When property taxes, water and sewer rates, insurance, utilities, labor, construction materials and every other cost needed to maintain and operate rent-stabilized housing go up, rents should increase commensurately.
But with a cap on rent increases, and no ceiling on taxes and expenses, small rent-stabilized building owners are pushed off the cliff — leaving less affordable housing for NYC families.
Our lawmakers have worsened the problem.
Albany saddled small rent-stabilized buildings with the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, which effectively made upgrades unaffordable by severely limiting rent increases to recoup costs.
The City Council continually adds burdensome and costly government mandates — most recently the broker-fee law that will likely force many owners to keep apartments empty.
The backlog in eviction proceedings in Housing Court allows deadbeats to skip without making good on arrears after living rent-free for months, sometimes years.
No cavalry is on the horizon for economically distressed small rent-stabilized building owners — the largest providers of affordable housing to millions of New Yorkers in low-income, brown, black and immigrant neighborhoods.
Their only hope — the only hope, really, for the families we house and for the very preservation of affordable housing — is the RGB, which must deliberate amid an irrational rent-freeze chorus from shouting activists.
Message to the Democrats’ mayoral candidate: Freezing rents without freezing property taxes and operating costs doesn’t work. Bill de Blasio’s eight years of rent mismanagement have caught up with us.
In its vote on Monday, the RGB must send a clear message to all candidates and politicians: That it’s an independent board not swayed by political pressure.
Housing policies that punish small building owners — who are mostly people of color and generational owners of immigrant backgrounds — also punish the families they house, shaking the foundation of the city’s affordable housing landscape.
Anti-owner policies are anti-tenant policies.
We don’t expect the city to freeze property taxes, water bills and other government-driven costs.
And if Zohran Mamdani becomes our next mayor, his platform points to an anti-small-property-owner scenario worse than the one de Blasio created.
That leaves the RGB as the first, last and only champion for small rent-stabilized building owners.
Will this panel be able to shut out the background noise and abide by its own math, so that small-building owners can provide safe, affordable housing to the New Yorkers counting on them every day?
And what if this RGB panel blazed its own trail and did some thinking outside the box?
For example, the board could try to rescue the most deeply distressed buildings by considering separate, higher rent adjustments for apartment leases in such situations.
It would be a sensible first step in keeping small owners off the city’s next lien sale — and walking the affordable housing crisis off the ledge.
Does the RGB have the courage to proceed where other panels in the past have failed?
Ann Korchak is board president of the Small Property Owners of New York, where Jan Lee is a board member.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
