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.
There are two major forces increasing market rent in NYC:
1) Serious lack of supply since the majority of apartments in NYC are rent regulated in one way, so the tenants never move.
2) NYC property taxes on rental apartment buildings are absurdly high (approximately 1/3rd of gross rent) not to mention all other cost of doing business in NYC are high.
It’s not the landlords who are greedy, as the dude with the hat claims. As long as property taxes are outragously high, like they are on multifamily rental housing in NYC, landlords have no choice but to increase rents as much as possibe, just to catch up.
dur;
Perhaps you should set the example for us all? Why don’t you buy an apartment in Chelsea for $1M, and sell it for the same price 25 years from now?
Benson
I am recently retired from the NYPD. Montrose, I usually agree with you but you are incorrect in your accessment that only a small number of officers make over 100K. After five years of service the average officer will make that amount. Officers sometimes make more than their superiors because there is more overtime at their rank. The same holds true for the FDNY and Corrections. My friends who are teachers make even more under their new contract. Take a look in “The Chief Leader” civil service weekly newspaper and you will see what the salaries are. The $12,500 that the poster referred to is called a defined benefit/variable supplement and damned right I earned every penny of it. The problem is that the starting salary for officers in the beginning of their careers is atrocious. Many of them have to live with their parents and some because they are married and have children are actually eligible for food stamps! I collect more in my pension checks than they earn by getting up everyday and putting their lives on the line. Of course the PBA will continue to tout the info about the officers not at top pay who are not the majority because that’s what they’re supposed to do to get a better contract from the city. Hell, state troopers and Nassau/Suffolk cops get a 89,000 base pay after 3 years! One thing that I am is honest and I can’t complain about our salaries when I came in contact with so many people everyday who got up to go to work just like I did, but just could not make ends meet nor did they have health insurance. They worked in city offices, hospitals, bank branches, supeermarkets, etc… So while the finest, boldest and bravest deserve every dime that they get, let’s not forget the other working New Yorker’s who are really bad off ans stop the pity party for us.
I think we should raise the monthly mortgages of owners to coincide with market prices because they’re totally fucking everything up. Paying 50k for a Chelsea apartment in 1985 and having be worth 700k now is ruining everyone elses buying power.
stop fuckin up the system.
dur
I think the issue is that Mitchell-Lama housing, like rent-controlled apartments, benefits many people who may once have had low income but no longer are in that situation. That in turn means that people who really need such housing have to turn to the free market and end up paying through the nose and squashing kids into 1 BR apartments or suffering very long commutes, while Auntie or whoever who has lived in a ML building for 29 years has enough money to buy a second home in Florida and leave the ML apt empty most of the time. Obviously as long as this kind of situation persists, few people are going to support the continued existence of subsidized housing for low income people.
No one said police, teachers, etc are poor. One of my parents was a teacher, too. However, we are talking about affording middle class housing here. While a salary of $50 – $60K ain’t chump change in anyone’s world, it is not all that much if you are trying to live anywhere near where many of the jobs are. By the way, much of the Mitchell-Lama housing are already in all of those neighborhoods that are being listed by someone. Many of these places are investigating getting out of the program. So what’s next? Commute from Camden?
No one is looking for a freebie. No one ever said they wanted a freebie. It’s only socialist bs when you can’t be a part of it, 4:43. The amount of resentment here towards hard working people catching a well deserved break in a program designed to make the city a better place to live and work is horrifying.
ML is a crock of shit. f this socialist bs. move further out until you can afford where you live. freebies are disgusting.
“Again, I’m curious: Other than leaving the city, sterilization or pushing them into the river to die, where should a middle class family go?”
Staten Island. Coney Island. Brighton Beach. Canarsie. Ozone Park. Bay Ridge. Ridgewood. Flatlands. Flatbush.
The rest of the discussion aside can we get off of the tired meme that police, fireman, and teachers are poor. Both my parents were educators. We weren’t wealthy but they made decent money. Many teachers, fireman, and police are better paid and have better benefits than people working in the private sector…and no, its not just the chiefs and the principals.