Mass Eviction by Owner to Occupy Tenement

A couple is trying to evict all of the tenants in the 15-unit rent-control building at 47-49 East Third Street in the East Village under a loop hole in rent laws that allows for such evictions in the case that the owner plans to use the space for himself. According to this article, the claim has to pass the “giggle” test, i.e. the landlord must prove his good faith intention to live in apartments he is seeking to evict the tenants from. While hard stats are hard to come by, one lawyer who specializes in these cases estimates that landlords were on the losing end only a quarter of the time. In the rest of the cases, tenants were forced out after receiving a low 5-figure settlement.

It’s hard to take this family’s claim that they need 11,200 square feet to themselves seriously, but as the real estate market has heated up, the number of these types of cases has been increasing for obvious reasons. And while it’s impossible not to empathize with those being displaced, ultimately we think the problem lies with the rent control law itself, an economically unsound social policy that raises the overall cost of housing in this city. We have no problem with the decision as a society to subsidize the housing costs of certain portions of the population–the elderly, handicapped, etc.–in fact, we support it in such clear-cut cases. But rather than forcing individual landlords to absorb that cost on a random basis, we think market rates should be allowed to prevail and the government should give the members of the subsidized population direct payments to help pay their market rents (or pay the landlords directly). That would avoid situations like a friend we know who inherited his family’s rent control 10-room Park Avenue apartment that he still pays less than $2,000 a month for and do a better job of making sure the subsidies get to the right people. The current system is fraught with inefficiencies and invites the kind of corner-cutting on display in this article. That’s what we think, anyway.
Everybody Out? [NY Times]