Stopping Big Rent Hikes at Ex-Mitchell-Lamas
The state has closed a loophole that allowed landlords to enact huge rent hikes upon exiting the Mitchell-Lama program. Under the loophole, owners of Mitchell-Lama rental buildings constructed before 1974 will no longer be able to raise rents to market rate by claiming that leaving the program amounts to a unique and peculiar circumstance. (Instead,…
The state has closed a loophole that allowed landlords to enact huge rent hikes upon exiting the Mitchell-Lama program. Under the loophole, owners of Mitchell-Lama rental buildings constructed before 1974 will no longer be able to raise rents to market rate by claiming that leaving the program amounts to a unique and peculiar circumstance. (Instead, the units will become rent-stabilized.) The new regulation comes as government programs like Mitchell-Lama subsidize fewer and fewer units in the city: Between 1990 and 2006, the city lost 27 percent, or 32,422, of its apartments in subsidy programs, according to data from the Community Service Society. Although the regulation may have an impact on many of Brooklyn’s Mitchell-Lama buildings, it won’t matter at its largest one. The present or future owners of Starrett City could bring rents at the 5,800-unit complex to market rate if they left Mitchell-Lama, since the development was completed in 1974.
Albany Bars Rent Rise for Thousands [NY Times]
Starrett City’s Owners Look to Leave Mitchell-Lama [Brownstoner]
Photo by West Side Neighborhood Alliance.
9:04:
Affluent parents pay for the tuitions, test prepping, and coaching that give their kids an unfair advantage over equallly bright ones who can’t afford it, and that’s not fair. And bribery takes many different forms: contributions to colleges in advance of their children’s applications; gifts (and threats) to teachers for recommendations (read the newspapers about the prep-school teacher in Riverdale who was fired for writing about it); and service on committees and boards that greases the wheels admissions time. (I saw plenty of this during my college and graduate-school years; there were even kids who had been registered at birth!) As Lani Guinier at Harvard writes, instead of filling out applications, kids should just send in their parents’ tax returns (or better yet, their grand parents’ tax returns).
NOP
10.45, you’ve got it upside down. The affluent parents pay to tilt their progeny’s profile to the admissions requirement, not vice versa. Unless you are suggesting the parents regularly bribe the admissions committee or something.
9:26,
“i am rich” ?
Please tell me that’s a reference to your first name
and not a comment on your wealth because that would
be sort of, you know, piglike, no?
I’m not going to bother, Benson, to try to convert you. Waste of my time, and any reader of this forum. I have no idea why you are so fixated on the notion that some kind of lottery gave people a free ride. The facts associated with Mitchell-Lama and other programs totally dispute that claim.
Even if you were right, the amount of money we as tax payers contribute to any kind of subsidized housing pales in comparison to the massive corporate greed, and monumental rip offs that take place in this country, right in our faces every day. If my tax dollars help pay to keep decent, hardworking people in this city, works for me. It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the things my tax dollars go to that I don’t benefit from directly.
I don’t have a car or children. Why should I pay for roads or education? Because it’s for the common good. I don’t have any life threatening diseases, why should I pay for gov’t funded reasearch? Because it’s for the common good. Insuring an economic cross section in the population makes a better city, it enriched all of our lives with a diversity of cultures, experiences and talents. That is what separates us from Anywhere, USA.
Yeah, we close the loopholes, weed out the cheaters, and tweak the system until it works better. While we are at it, let’s also get rid of corporate welfare, Wall Street’s celebration of firings and unemployment by rewarding the ruination of lives, ridiculous CEO salaries, cronyism in the public and private sectors, subsidies to farmers for empty fields or artificially low prices, unfair trade laws, monopolies of any kinds, the old boy network, restrictive country clubs and the glass ceiling for minorities and women in most industries. If you want true fairness, all of these issues need to be addressed, as well as many more. They suck more dollars from our pockets than any abuses of New York City’s housing laws.
I don’t say everyone is corrupt. I say that in spite of the corruption around us, some of us still care that people have the opportunity to build lives in affordable homes. The programs were established for a reason, the people who qualified for them have every right to be there. We need more such housing, not the dismantling of the system.
Benson:
Please re-read the following:
“Abuses in housing developments? Sure, crack down. But there are bigger systemic problems whose correction might help pierce the bubble of bitterness so much displayed on this site.”
The paragraph calls for:
1) Cracking down on Mitchell Lama abuses.
2) Correcting bigger abuses to help relieve some of the bitterness people feel.
Inelegantly written, I’ll admit. But not cynical.
NOP
NOP;
Like Montrose, you can’t state a postive rationale for Mitchell-Lama. And so, you fall back to class-based cynicsm: a combination of “everyone is corrupt” and “life is unfair”.
Great way to build a society: pure cynicism.
Enjoy the nightcap!
Benson
10:14:
We call them cars, not limousines.
NOP
Benson, Benson, Benson:
As if Mitchell Lama is the only “closed” or “rigged” system!
I notice you don’t include tax-exempt universities in your reply, perhaps because you’ve been reading the newspaper stories that even within so-called “public” universities 80% of the places go to applicants from the top 20% in household income, leaving kids from the bottom 80% to scramble for that 20% of leftover spaces, even as their parents pay taxes to support the education of richer kids. (And let’s not even touch the tax-exempt Ivy League, targeted from pre-school by affluent parents who pay and pay and pay to “tilt” the admissions process in their tykes’ favor.)
And are Mitchell Lama residents the only people in this town with senses of entitlement? What about our CEOs with their enormous payouts irrespective of performance, also much covered in the press? These are the folks negotiating (and getting) fat tax exemptions to keep their companies in town and riding off with bushels of cash from the “little” stockholder.
The anger directed at Mitchell Lama residents is misplaced. There’s more widespread, costly, and deeper cronyism and malfeasance almost anywhere else you might care to look. Abuses in housing developments? Sure, crack down. But there are bigger systemic problems whose correction might help pierce the bubble of bitterness so much displayed on this site.
Now I’m going to have a nightcap. Perhaps, Benson, we’ll meet again on Brownstoner.
Nostalgic on Park Avenue
haha, anyone notice the irony in the Oro advertisement on this page for an art exhibition to “celebrate” Brooklyn-based artists? all you developers in Brooklyn’s hottest neighborhoods have one group of people to thank for your success: the ones whose presence make neighborhoods desirable, the very artists you ridicule here. thanks for the celebration and congratulations on your cash.