Housing advocates reeling but hopeful after busy week

By Chris Lombardi

Computer programmer Edie Cote, 66, has lived at London Terrace Gardens, the 70-year-old complex on Ninth Avenue between 24th and 25th Streets, for more than 30 years. The complex, once fully protected by rent-stabilization, now rents 40 percent of its apartments at market rate, starting at $3,000 for a studio apartment. Cote, who is president of the complex’s tenants association, believes that many of her neighbors are being priced out of their apartments, despite a legal provision that protects those with incomes under $75,000.

‘“People are increasingly living in fear of losing their homes, of getting kicked out,” she said.

This Tuesday, Cote was one of hundreds of tenants who descended on the Cooper Union for the Rent Guidelines Board’s final 2007 meeting, where that body met to consider this year’s rent increases for rent-stabilized apartments, and where housing advocates presented Mayor Bloomberg with a “Housing Report Card” which gave him a few A’s as well as quite a number of F’s. While advocates and legislators have praised the Bloomberg administration for its commitment to build more affordable housing, most point out that his ambitious building program will at best barely replace the number of affordable units being lost to the erosion of rent-stabilization.

Meanwhile, on Friday June 15, tenants and housing advocates rallied at City Hall to support a new bill, sponsored by State Senators Tom Duane and Liz Krueger, that would place a moratorium on further privatization of buildings constructed under the Mitchell-Lama program. And while they mobilized in Albany over the course of the week, they failed to get the moratorium passed or to secure a passel of other housing priorities.

“There is such a tremendous erosion of affordable housing in New York City,” said Duane as he opened the City Hall press conference two weeks ago. “We really need some breathing space, not this constant stream of buyouts and privatization.”

Between units leaving rent-stabilization and the Mitchell-Lama buyouts, advocates for affordable housing in New York understandably felt fatigued this past week but continue to press on.

With exactly one week remaining in the State Legislature’s session, Duane and Kruger called the news conference to rally support behind S6120, which would “create a temporary state commission to study state- and locally-aided housing programs and provide “a moratorium on the voluntary dissolution of limited profit, limited dividend and redevelopment housing companies.” The moratorium would apply to the publicly subsidized housing complexes established under the 1955 Mitchell-Lama program. Started with a mix of public mortgages and land grants, the city’s 119 Mitchell-Lama complexes are now supported with a crazy-quilt of federal, state and city funding streams. At the same time, in the face of today’s sizzling real estate market, many owners are considering withdrawing from Mitchell-Lama, placing many residents at risk.

“This issue is not just about the people who live in affordable housing,” Duane added. “The state has invested a tremendous amount of money in these units so that moderate-income people in New York would have a place to live.”

According to reports from the nonprofit Community Service Society, Comptroller William Thompson, and the state’s own Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR), New York City has lost more than 50,000 units of affordable housing since 1990, nearly half of those in buildings built under the Mitchell-Lama program. Since 1990, more than 26,000 units have been lost as Mitchell-Lama co-ops decided to go private and landlords of Mitchell-Lama rental buildings paid off their low-interest mortgages—all in addition to the 13,000 apartments removed every year from rent-stabilization by “high-rent vacancy decontrol.”

The state and city need to step in more firmly, Senator Liz Krueger told Chelsea Now before her press conference began. “The state dropped the ball on affordable housing 25 years ago. It was like [they said], ‘We created Mitchell-Lamas, and now we’re done,’” she said. “Now, with the federal government walking away from affordable housing, the city is being very proactive, trying a lot of measures, but we’re decades behind.”

The Mitchell-Lama moratorium bill was characterized by both state senators as a last-ditch effort. “We basically said desperate times call for desperate actions,” Krueger said. “Let’s call for a moratorium. Let’s take a breather and stop the buyouts, while we look at what might work.”

The state commission proposed in the bill, which would have an equal number of members appointed by the governor and the majority leaders of the Assembly and the Senate, would evaluate all of the proposed “fixes” for the program, both for the remaining rental buildings (45,000 units) and the limited-equity cooperatives (69,000 units).

Residents of buildings at risk of leaving the program attended the City Hall press conference, from both rental buildings like Southbridge Towers and cooperatives like East Midtown Plaza (both in Manhattan). Residents of the latter said that their board, in voting to privatize, did not consider the impact of such changes on older residents, who are less interested in short-term profit than stability.

Dorothy Rassenberger has lived at East Midtown Plaza, a Mitchell-Lama on East 23rd Street, for 14 years, far fewer than the rest of her floor. The board of her building voted for privatization in 2002, but the process has been slowed because of mortgage issues.

In opposing the buyout, Rassenberger finds herself opposing her own 30-year-old son, John, who secured an apartment at East Midtown a few years ago. “All he sees is the money,” she said. Like other pro-privatization advocates, her son does not adequately take into account the financial liabilities, such as taxes on the sale or maintenance costs, she said, or how the complex’ many elderly residents will be able to contend with the increased costs.

Meantime, the moratorium has had a rather strange life in Albany, quickly becoming popular, with 10 Senate co-sponsors and a companion Assembly bill carried by Rep. Vito Lopez of Brooklyn. But it never made out of committee before the session ended. According to Duane, there just was not enough time to gather momentum in the face of opposition from Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno.

He added that moratorium advocates did have one small victory on Mitchell-Lama, with passage of a bill that will make it harder for such boards to privatize by requiring absentee board members to use a standard form to cast their proxy votes. “Of course,” the state senator said with some humor, “I would have preferred to pass the bill that meant that to dissolve the corporation, they would have to actually show up,” but such is politics.

Duane added that the moratorium is far from dead: “We’re coming back [for the short session requested by Governor Spitzer] on July 16, and we’ll keep pushing. The work of the housing groups, the calls to legislators, have been tremendous on this one—everyone’s talking about it.”

One such advocate, Patrick Coleman, preservation coordinator for the Chelsea-based Tenants and Neighbors Coalition, pointed out that the decline of Mitchell-Lama has a ripple effect on the entire housing market.

Since Mitchell-Lama owners can leave the program after 25 years, a large group built in the 1970s came “due” around the mid-1990s, he explained. “And [1995 is] when you see this explosion in the rental market,” said Coleman, “I would tend to believe the two are related... When a community loses an affordable-housing resource, it has an effect on all rents on the neighborhood.” This trend holds true both for Mitchell-Lama buildings, whether rental or co-op, and buildings like London Terrace, which are undergoing a “slow bleed” of their rent-stabilized units.

Coleman’s group was the main organizer of Tuesday’s rally at the Rent Guidelines Board, which—ignoring requests from Duane, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, and others for a rent freeze—decided that rents for rent-stabilized apartments would rise 3 percent for one-year leases and 5 percent for two-year leases. But while tenant groups in attendance shouted at the board, the real target of the Coalition was the absent Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who was presented in absentia with a “Housing Report Card” that included Mitchell-Lama among a host of other housing issues.

Michael McKee, founder of Tenants and Neighbors and currently treasurer of TenantsPAC, told Chelsea Now: “The mayor will say, ‘Both sides are unhappy, so we must be doing something right.’ But the landlords aren’t unhappy. The people the Mayor appointed to this board, they’re all bankers and have no idea what working people are going through.”

The mayor only received three A’s on the report card, including one for “preserving distressed HUD Housing” (a reference to recent stepped-up building inspections) and a sarcastic A for “Market Rate Housing,” for the development boom fueled by zoning changes and tax breaks. While praising the mayor’s commitment to affordable housing, advocates said his plan doesn’t address the current crisis.

“The mayor’s plan is for 165,000, but we’ve already lost 200,000 to vacancy decontrol,” said Natasha Winegar, an organizer with Tenants and Neighbors. What would make a difference, Winegar added, would be for Bloomberg to weigh in on the web of state laws that impact city tenants.

“He has a tremendous amount of influence in the State Senate,” said Winegar, but instead, the Duane/Kruger Mitchell-Lama bill, the extension of rent-stabilization to all former Mitchell-Lama rental buildings, and a proposed exemption from rent increases for disabled residents remain stuck in Albany committees.

But the most significant F, shared by all interviewed, was for “Understanding rent regulation as an affordable housing program.” The mayor’s reliance solely on market incentives, said advocates and legislators, reflects a rarely voiced belief that regulation is a dirty word, instead of a set of tools that empowers ordinary people to help enforce the law.

“Regulation provides a way for tenants to monitor the condition of New York’s housing stock,” Duane told Chelsea Now. When tenants do not fear that they will be priced out of their homes, he said, they are more likely to ask for needed repairs and keep pushing until they get them. “That ensures that New York’s affordable housing remains in good condition,” he added, and prevents the need for major repairs that landlords often use to justify higher rents.

Bloomberg’s resistance to rent regulation, Duane added, means he’s not at all interested in what housing activists call “home rule”: giving New York City control of the rent laws, which have been determined by Albany for more than 30 years. A bill to do just that, sponsored again by State Senator Krueger and Assemblyman Lopez, has been a perennial loser.

“This is where Bloomberg has failed us,” said Edie Cote. “He flip-flops. At one point early in his term he liked it, but now he’s focusing on new construction, and paying no attention to our requests to give home rule back…. My reason for being here today? Home rule, and maintaining our affordable-housing stock.” When she and her husband moved to New York, she said, “we had to stretch to figure out how to afford a place. Now, young people and young artists, where are they gonna live?”