NYC has always been a hard place in which to live. But now things are getting worse. Recently, New York (not sure if the city or state) has enacted a law prohibiting landlords from evicting tenants for any reason without going to the housing court first - even after a lease has ended. This makes it much harder to get rid of bad tenants who cause problems in the building for other residents.
I'm not aware of all the factors that are affecting the above tenant's protest. But I now see references to cockroaches and other vermin in this person's protest signage. Without the ability to get rid of a bad tenant, a landlord could see an apartment trashed without the ability to remove the tenant. In the case of my co-op, it took a water line break for us to find that an apartment had been abandoned and that it had been trashed - literally. (There was trash in every room of the apartment, and we had to pay a contractor to clean it out before we could even fix the plumbing in the place.) Even if a landlord wants to keep an apartment in good repair, he can't afford to do so - laws regarding apartment rent increases prohibit the landlord from making those repairs and raising the rent to what the market will bear. So, apartments are being kept empty instead of being repaired and rented out.
Currently, NYC has 3 classes of rental apartments: Rent Controlled, Rent Stabilized, and Free Market Rentals. Rent Controlled apartments are the most troublesome for landlords, as many rents were established right after World War 2, and have not gone up enough to match the rate of inflation. Leases for these apartments have been handed down from generation to generation, as family members retain the right to live in their apartments in perpetuity. Rent Stabilized apartments are slightly different, as a rent control board allows landlords to raise rents to some board approved degree - only after inflation has taken its toll. These apartments lose their stabilized prices when tenants vacate the place. In theory, landlords can evict bad tenants in these apartments, but don't often do so. And then there the Free Market Rentals. There were no rent controls whatsoever, until this law changed.
Now, NYC has even a bigger problem than before. There are fewer incentives to be landlords, and we will see a speedier shift towards apartments being turned into condominiums, or new condominiums being built. People like RQS would be in a bind, as they can't afford to buy their apartments (or others like them), nor could they afford to pay free market rates for the few apartments that are available. Other cities don't have as bad a problem as New York, as they never made the mistake of preserving rent controls over several generations. Yet, these problems might be a blessing to New York in disguise in the long term, as they tamp down the need for the city to keep upgrading its infrastructure for a growing population. Could you imagine having to find enough water in the watersheds for double NYC's population? What about the need for more mass transit options? Sanitation? I could go on and on with the problems we could have if real estate developers had their way. But we need solutions today, and no one has any. Too much success might be the one thing that kills New York City. Hopefully, I won't be nearby when it dies....
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