This post has been read 2685 times!
June 3, 2015- The Daily News reports that more than 100,000 rent-stabilized apartments will have the rent hiked 20% due to a loophole that allows vacant apartments to receive such hikes. This is one reason that gateway Plaza has vacant apartments. They are smoking out the low-rent-payers, then jacking up the rent 20% for the new suckers. The article states that Downtown will lose the most.
The article explains, “Under the current law, once a tenant moves out of a rent-regulated apartment, the landlord is allowed to jack up the monthly rent by 20%. That process is known as vacancy deregulation. Adding 20% to $2,100 bumps all 100,000 of those apartments out of the program, which cuts off at $2,500. Losing 100,000 relatively affordable apartments — roughly 10% of the city’s total number of rent-regulated apartments — would be a “disaster,” said Michael McKee, a veteran housing advocate and treasurer of the New York Tenants Political Action Committee. “New York City has never had a loose housing market, but it’s worse than it has ever been,” he said.”
Good news! We can only hope that this will be the beginning of the end of the absurd system known as “rent regulation” under which 2 different families pay vastly different prices for the same apartment.