The Rent Guidelines Board voted for the biggest rent hike in a decade, and both landlords and tenants are unhappy. Why the universal discontent each year? kvelsey reports
Photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images This year, the Rent Guidelines Board voted for the biggest rent hike in a decade, with a 3.25 percent increase on one-year leases and a 5 percent increase on two-year leases, but once again, both landlords and tenants walked away unhappy. It’s a dramatic annual ritual that always, no matter the increase or lack thereof, ends in universal discontent, lending at least the appearance of fairness to the proceedings.
“The law is very vague as to what you’re supposed to take into account — affordability and the market. You look at landlord economics and tenant economics and they don’t give you the same answer, so somehow you have to reconcile,” said Mark Willis, the senior policy fellow at NYU’s Furman Center. Virtually no one agrees on how we should work out those numbers or even what data should be used to do so, so every year we get a repeat of the same performance.
Much as rent stabilization has been decried by the real-estate industry over the years, it was actually designed as a landlord-friendly alternative to another bill that would have extended rent control to postwar housing, McKee pointed out.
That said, rent-stabilized tenants are not, despite a handful of Post stories over the years on millionaires in rent-regulated apartments, on the whole, wealthy. They have a median household income of $47,000 a year, as opposed to $62,960 for non-regulated units, according to the city’s 2021 Housing and Vacancy Survey, and more than half of all renter households citywide are rent burdened, meaning that they spend between 30 and 50 percent of their income on rent.
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Megan Rapinoe Laid Out Exactly Why Anti-Trans Sports Bans Are Cruel“Sports is not the most important thing in life.”
Read more »
Why FasciaBlasters May Be the Cure to Everything from Cellulite to WrinklesIf this new wellness trend screams late-night infomercial, just look at the daringly bare before-and-after photos in the invitation-only forum on Facebook.
Read more »
Why Odell Beckham could ‘take his time’ to pick next teamOdell Beckham Jr. may not pick his next team before the season starts.
Read more »
Opinion | Why Merrick Garland Must Prosecute Donald Trump for Insurrectionist PlotTreason? A professor notes that the framers of the Constitution had \u0022a very specific image in mind—men gathering with guns, forming an army, and marching on the seat of government.\u0022
Read more »
Why A Gas Tax Holiday Probably Won’t WorkThe gasoline tax holiday being proposed is unlikely to provide any noticeable relief to high gasoline prices.
Read more »