New Yorkers win rent control war

by Fred Gaboury

This article was reprinted from the June 21, 1997 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

NEW YORK - The seven-month battle pitting 2.7 million New Yorkers living in rent-regulated apartments against 25,000 landlords ended in the early morning of June 16 when GOP State Sen. Joseph Bruno and Republican Gov. George Pataki were forced to agree to extend major provisions of existing rent laws for the next six years. More than a million apartments are covered by these laws.

Bruno, picked as Senate Majority Leader by New York's GOP Senator Alphonse D'Amato, was forced to retreat in the face of a massive fightback by a statewide coalition of tenant organizations that organized letter-writing and telephone campaigns, collected hundreds of thousands of names on petitions, organized demonstrations and picket lines and sent thousands of people to the state capitol on May 20 to participate in Tenants Lobby Day.

Bruno had promised the real estate lobby that rent regulation would not be extended. "The legislature doesn't have to do anything," he boasted.

"The regulations will expire at midnight, June 15 unless they are renewed," he threatened. Real estate interests contributed more than $2 million to GOP coffers in the last election cycle.

Although the June 16 "conceptual agreement" between Pataki, Bruno and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Democrat from Manhattan, was still in the process of being reduced to specific legislation at press time, landlords will be allowed to increase rents on vacant rent-regulated apartments by at least 20 percent.

A special $100-a-month "bonus" can be charged when apartments renting for $300 a month or less become vacant. Presently rent increases for vacant apartments are limited to a maximum of 16 percent.

While landlords were able to wrest important concessions in the negotiations that had all but stalled the legislature, most housing advocates called the agreement a victory for tenants.

Berniece Siegal, speaking for the Queens League of United Tenants, told reporters, "Not only did we beat back the attempt to deregulate entirely but we beat back the attempt to do vacancy decontrol."

While agreeing that landlords had been defeated in their attempt to destroy rent regulation, other tenant organizations pointed to weaknesses in the agreement.

"Obviously it's a victory for the tenants side. We defeated vacancy decontrol," Jenny Laurie, executive director of the Metropolitan Council on Housing, said, adding that the "package most severely hits the lower-rent apartments that are the only resource for poor people."

Billy Easton, a leader of the New York State Tenants and Neighbors Coalition, blasted real estate interests as negotiations dragged on toward the zero-hour. "What do they consider fair?" he asked. "500 percent?"

As could be expected, landlord organizations and their supporters shed crocodile tears over the deal, with the New York Times editorializing that it "does nothing to dismantle the cumbersome bureaucracy that has crippled the housing market in New York."

Vacancy decontrol - the right to raise the rent on an apartment to "market levels" when a tenant moves, dies or is evicted - was the central demand of the real estate lobby.

Tenant leaders were unanimous in their criticism of New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, whose election year "opposition" to rent deregulation included several well- publicized photo-op trips to Albany and establishment of a telephone hot line in city hall to respond to tenants' concerns.

A hotline "is quite beside the point," Ruth Messinger, Democratic candidate for mayor, told reporters during a candlelight vigil as the fight over rent regulation neared its climax.

John Bachtell, chair of the New York District of the Communist Party, said the June 16 agreement was a defeat for the right wing of the Republican Party. "The rent fight mobilized the largest, the most militant movement that we've seen since the Vietnam era. Now the challenge is to broaden its focus - to bring its power into play in the welfare battle, the fight to fund education and to protect affirmative action," he said.

Then, pointing to the fact that the housing crisis can only be solved by construction of millions of units of affordable housing, Bachtell added: "The tenant's movement has a self-interest to work for enactment of the Martinez Public Works Jobs Bill (HR-950) that appropriates billions of dollars for new construction and renovation of housing, schools and the infrastructure."