Jul 12, 2008 4:23 pm US/Eastern
Rangel's Apartments Renew NYC Rent Control Debate
NEW YORK (AP) ―
For bargain-hungry New Yorkers searching for more space for less money, the rent-stabilized apartment can be an elusive prize.
There are about 1 million of the below-market units left in the city, although housing advocates complain they are disappearing at an alarming rate. The news that U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel has rented four of them for 10 to 20 years in his Harlem high-rise renewed a long-running debate about the apartments—who gets them, and do they really deserve them?
"I would like one. I don't have one. I've been looking for one for 30 years," said Lucas A. Ferrara, a law professor who blogs on city real estate. "It's just a function of being in the right place at the right time."
Decades-old, sometimes indecipherable regulations govern rent stabilization in the city, which advocates say was intended to protect low- and middle-income residents from escalating rents that price them out of their neighborhoods.
Today, the rules can benefit senior citizens living in the same apartment they grew up in—paying many times less rent than some of their neighbors—or new tenants who pay somewhere below market for apartments that have changed hands a few times.
Then there are the stories of celebrities or the super rich paying less than $1,000 a month for prime real estate, others who knew the landlord. Some tenants charged that Rangel's apartments—three adjacent units and a studio several floors below—represent an unfair abuse of the system.
"It has nothing to do with fair," said Brenda Cargill, who has lived in Rangel's apartment building since 1960, when she was a child moving in with her parents. She said tenants who inherit, or maintain, rent-stabilized apartments earn their space, even next to higher-paying neighbors. "I think of it as a balance. No one is getting over on anyone."
Cargill, who wouldn't say how much rent she pays for a two-bedroom apartment at Lenox Terrace, succeeded her parents as a tenant after they passed away. Her parents were among the first tenants of the complex, which at the time was the only one in the neighborhood with a doorman.
"They were middle class, worked every day," she said. "They wanted to get ahead in life."
The city's regulations allow tenants to hold onto the apartments if they establish it as their primary residence, living there for just over six months a year, and pay increases every one or two years set by a city board.
The apartments can be taken out of stabilization if the rent increases to over $2,000 a month, and if tenants' income exceeds $175,000 for two years in a row.
Rangel pays $3,894 a month for all four apartments, The New York Times reported. Ferrara said if his net household income exceeded $175,000, a landlord could move to raise the rent on the apartments. But "that is a landlord's choice," he said. The Olnick Organization has declined comment on Rangel's living situation.
Rangel defended the arrangement as a legal benefit of his long-term residency in the city, saying he moved in nearly 20 years ago when "it was damn near empty because no one could afford to live here."
Gordon Fauntleroy, who has lived one floor above Rangel's apartment for over 30 years, said staying power entitles tenants to below-market rents.
"If they've been here awhile, it doesn't matter who they are or what office they hold, the rent should be stabilized," he said.
Jason Kirby, who pays $1,900 a month for an unstabilized one-bedroom apartment in the same building, said he also has a deal, compared to the space he was renting on the Upper East Side. Even if his rent was stabilized, the 35-year-old restaurant manager is going to move to the suburbs in a few years, for even more space.
He called rent-stabilization "a golden pair of handcuffs" in the city. "The benefit of being here and staying here and making your home here in the city is you get, if you're lucky enough, a rent stabilized apartment. ... Then you can't go anywhere else."
(© 2008 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
WCBSTV.com's Most Popular Pages
