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.
3.06;
My background is similiar to yours. My father was a Teamster and I was raised in the city (part of my yourth was spent in projects, not M-L). I find your post disturbing. It is backwards-looking in so many ways. It is great material for a Jimmy Breslin type column, but doesn’t correspond to the current reality of NYC.
Are you claiming that we natives have some special “right”? Are you claiming that those who are recent arrivals, those whose infusion of talent, enthusiasm and money (read: taxes) in large part revived this city, should have no say in how it is run? Are you saying that these housing programs should be maintained as some type of “entitlement” to the working class from days of yore?
NYC as an industrial city died in the 1970’s. No housing entitlement/lottery for a lucky few is going to change this fact. Moreover, I make the assertion that it was indeed the city goverment’s inability to adjust with the changing economics/development of the town that hindered its progress. Instead of welcoming new talent and business sectors, it created entitlement programs such as ML: a lottery system for the “woiking stiff”, or so they said. As others have mentioned on this board, it degenerated into the way of all lottery entitlement systems: corruption, lying about incomes, etc.
Finally, your hyperbole notwithstanding, there are plenty of places for middle income folks to go in this city, as 3.19 pointed out.
Benson
“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?”
Dyker Heights. Kensington. Jackson Heights. Forest Hills (expensive houses, cheap co-ops). Ditmas Park (ditto).
What amazing insight these forums offer. I can now confirm my suspicions about most of the smug, elitist, new arrivals that I have the unfortunate luck of standing shoulder to shoulder with on the F train.
I’m curious: Did that recent Brownstoner survey include how many minutes some of you have lived in this city? Oh wait… that doesn’t matter because fat wallet trumps lifelong residency. Right bro’?
I was brought up in Mitchell Lama housing. Ten years in Queens and ten years in the Bronx.
My father was a Teamster back when there was still industry this city. Mitchell Lama housing in the 70’s was one of the few options for a middle class fleeing a city that most of you could never imagine.
Beyond incentive to developers, the 20 year opt-out loophole existed because the city believed that, down the line, affordable housing would always exist and be provided for the middle class.
Polyannaish or just plain bullsh*t, the city got it wrong and we’re facing a crisis now because of it.
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?
Bring on those snarky, oh-so-smart answers then go back to your latest issue of Time Out New York.
I love the adjustable standards at work among some here. Some here advocate draconian measures for others that you would never do yourselves. You’d be howling like wolves.
12:53 – the majority of Mitchell-Lama buildings are NOT in Manhattan, so in terms of this discussion, your ridiculous assertion that Manhattan should be a rich enclave has no teeth. And why should it be so? Who wants to live like Rio, or Johanessburg, the rich surrounded by rings of increasing levels of poverty? Gives me the shudders.
1:56, can we get off of the top salaries of teachers, police and fire depts, as examples of income, because most of them do not make that amount of money, and there are far more Indians than chiefs in all depts. That’s like saying that all actors are rich because of the salaries of the mega-stars, when 95% of actors make far, far less. Besides which, they all earn it, and deserve it. Any $12,500 bonus is peanuts compared to Wall Street bonuses in a bad year. Why begrudge people the things many here take for granted as due them? Some people act as if they are the only ones who deserve good things to happen to them, only because you make more money than the rest of us.
The fact that many people still in M-L buildings got in when they were making much less is a testament to the program’s success in providing great housing to middle income people. Who in their right mind would leave if they didn’t have to? I had no idea so many people here are to the manor born, and don’t have parents and relatives who are plain ol’ middle class folks, the very people who would qualify for this housing. Too much to think about your parents’ lives when they were just starting out, and you were a baby. If they had lived in New York City, they might have applied for Mitchell-Lama housing, too. And might still be there thirty years later – those horrible, sponging, undeserving and selfish people.
“Rent regulation is partially responsible for… organized-crime controlled construction industry.”
From what deep part of your ass did you pull that nugget?
I dig the hat.
community organizer = poverty pimp
In this case, ‘closing a loophole’ means changing the rules of the game midway through. The developers played by the rules, but now the state is going to change the rules. The ‘windfall’ a landlord gets when the building opts out of ML was already factored into the price he paid when he bought the building.
Rent regulation is partially responsible for the shortage of housing, along with exclusionary zoning, byzantine buildings regulations, and organized-crime controlled construction industry.
Dabrowski you are right on. I too have relatives living in ML housing throughout the city who all have incomes well above 100K. They also have 2nd homes in really nice places. One aunt, a retired school teacher doesn’t even live in her apartment because she is in Florida most of the year and travelling the rest. When they got the apartments they met the middle class guidelines over 20-30 years ago but the recertification process is not based on income like in public housing projects. By the way, teachers and firefighters aren’t so bad off once they hit top pay and move up in rank. They make over 100K retire after 20 years and have excellent benefits. Fire Chief and principals make over 120K. The same goes for Cops and CO’s and they get a 12,500 check every December, in addition to their pension which is their half pay once retired.
“It took sixty years for the price to return to that level.”
Wrong. You didn’t adjust for inflation.