Let us now sing the praises of rent stabilization.
I lost, in the course of my recent move, ten pounds. I hired people to do the heavy lifting, so it would appear that the weight loss was due primarily to the stress of the affair — of finding new housing against a tight deadline, of combing through all of my worldly possessions, of coordinating the spectacle, and of leaving the neighborhood that I knew. So great was the misery of the occasion that I had no appetite to speak of.
This is not to mention, of course, the financial devastation wrought by the move, which wiped out the better part of a year’s worth of savings in the space of a few days. It continues to chip away as my roommates and I discover the prices of picture frames and new furniture.
For many New Yorkers — and many Americans — who rent, this is the sordid annual ritual. Prices rise beyond reasonable levels. Everything goes in boxes. There are terrible application fees and security deposits and months of rent paid upfront. Then, for a year, whenever you think how much you like your bedroom window or your closet or the people on the street or the proximity to some neighborhood amenity, you temper the enjoyment with the bitter knowledge of the clock ticking down to the next move.
Why screw the bookshelf to the wall? Why get to know the neighbors? Why Ajax the bathtub? There are only so many days left before the rent moves up and you move out.
Until now, the physical marks of this were everywhere in my home. The desk at which I am typing is attached to its legs with velcro for easy removal in a move. The screws on my old bookshelves were stripped from being disassembled and reassembled so many times. The shelves, despite dire pictorial warnings from the Scandinavian manufacturer, were never attached to the wall a
nd had to be carefully balanced. My bed and nightstand pack flat. And there were The Boxes. Always The Boxes.
The fingerprints are everywhere. On the subway, there are advertisements for rentable furniture that you never own. Knowing that a generation of movers cannot afford or carry around quality items, retailers deal in what Dieter Rams would call “thoughtless design for thoughtless consumption.” Neighbors speak less (why get to know people when your overlap will only be a few short months?) while dating apps roll out features to find regular friends in the area.
The effects of climbing rents and constant moving are real. We waste money and materials. We erode and destabilize communities (not that something can be properly called a community when people are moving in and out all of the time). We wear people out.
We get away with this by telling ourselves that to live in a city is — like a child refusing to wear pants or a French major getting carried away with berets — “just a phase.” This becomes, of course, a self-fulfilling prophecy when adults snap after years of annual packing and moving between places where amenities like laundry machines are treated as a bourgeois indulgence.
I offer this litany in service of the point that moving is not just unpleasant, but that moving — and the rent increases that cause it — is a social and environmental menace to the fabric of American cities and life within them. (Rent increases are also a menace to the idea of housing altogether, but anyone my age who rents already knows that.)
New York figured out a solution to this issue decades ago in the form of rent stabilization. Like unemployment insurance, public libraries, or social security, rent stabilization is the sort of excellent policy that would get somebody laughed out of office if they proposed it today.
The rent on a stabilized apartment can only increase each year by a percentage set by the Rent Guidelines Board. The rate is typically lower than inflation and generally holds the rent below the extortionate “market rate.” This has the advantage of protecting the tenants — who have a statutory right to renew their stabilized leases — from spikes in rent. (Rent stabilization is distinct from the famous rent control program in which tenants’ rents could not be increased at all, which predated stabilization and fell out of favor during the post-war years.)
A rent-stabilized apartment is a grail. A stabilized apartment takes the place of homeownership altogether for some families. At housewarming parties, the rumor spreads in tones of awe: “What an apartment! Beautiful floors, so close to the train, and I heard someone mention that it’s stabilized! I would never move again. If I were them, I would die in this apartment."
It was with this in mind that my roommates and I terrified our apartment broker last March with our excitement before the beautiful word had even left his lips. It was a warm Sunday afternoon and we were sitting in an office and looking at floorplans for what was to become our home.
It will be 75 years in August since the first people moved into Stuyvesant Town - Peter Cooper Village, the neighborhood in which we now live. In 1947, when the mid-century superblock development opened, every single one of the 11,250 units was stabilized.
Plaques, installed in the neighborhood for more than fifty years, memorialized the hope of the place: “That families of moderate means might live in health, comfort, and dignity in parklike communities, and that a pattern might be set of private enterprise productively devoted to public service.” The plaques, neighborhood lore has it, vanished when the management started destabilizing rents with renovation-related legal loopholes in the early 2000s, converting to luxury, market-rate apartments as tenants moved out or died. The occupant of our apartment held out.
The New York State Division of Housing and Community Renewal will furnish, for residents of rent-stabilized apartments, a history of tenants and the rent that they have paid for as long as records have been kept. In 1984, the occupant of our apartment, a doctor at a local hospital, paid $687.65 each month for two bedrooms and two bathrooms. The amount crept up each year until — depending on which Google results you believe — he either died or moved to the Bronx. His final rent bill was $1,426.20 in 2004. A family held down the fort for the next two decades until we arrived, and the constant occupancy of the place meant that it was never converted to a luxury unit at market rate.
That sort of tenure in a New York apartment seems impressive until you learn that the apartment next door to us is on its second tenants ever. They moved in last year. The previous tenants arrived in 1947 and stayed in the building until the day they died.
We know, two months in, the names of all of the neighbors on our floor and their pets. We know, in broad strokes, the details of their lives in a way you can only come to know people who have lived in the same space for a very long time. It is the closest that I have come in adult life to the tree-lined block where I grew up in Holland, Michigan.
This is of little consequence to the landlords, who are out for blood. A court heard oral arguments last week in a suit between the corporate landlord and the Tenants Association over whether further apartments (ours among them) can be deregulated.
The Rent Guidelines Board, which sets the rent increases each year, has been slanted in favor of the landlords by the Mayor, who lives in a lovely City-owned mansion in the neighborhood I was just priced out of. The Board is, it seems, about to support the largest rent hike in a decade. There have been a series of public hearings in which tenants make impassioned pleas to stay in their homes. The landlords, presumably fresh off of their helicopters from the Hamptons, speak at the hearings about what a terrible strain it is on their families that the greedy tenants of today are so relentless in their demands for such luxuries as hot water and paint. The landlords, the media reports, are disappointed that they will not get the nine percent increase they want. People in hell want ice water.
I choose to believe that reason will prevail and stabilization will last. Anything else is too terrible a possibility. The notion of stabilized rent has a stabilizing effect on every area of life. Time itself seems to change. For the first time, I get to think about my home and community in terms of years instead of months. Screws replace Command strips for picture frames. Neighbors are friendlier when everyone is in it for the long haul. Life is easier when it doesn’t have to pack flat annually.
For my part, I have screwed a bookshelf to the wall for the first time in my life. It is a symbolic gesture that has the pleasant side effect of reducing the chance that I will be crushed in the night. A neighbor, meeting one of my roommates and me in the (in-building!!) laundry room, invited us to an upcoming party for the building. She has lived here for 35 years.
On the lawn in the middle of the neighborhood, the management has placed an enormous “75” decked out with flowers in recognition of the complex’s anniversary this summer. They do not mean it as a celebration of rent regulation, but I choose to believe that it is a callback to the optimistic hope of the neighborhood and of rent stabilization generally: That urban life is not an aberration or a phase, but that city dwellers — all city dwellers — deserve to live in health, comfort, and dignity year after year after year.
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
“Building Stuyvesant Town, A Mid-Century Controversy” from the Bowery Boys.
Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, the neighborhood that I now call home, has existed in its current form for seventy-five years. Like most mid-century urban redevelopment projects, its utopian vision stands alongside a history that is less than sterling.
Before it was a superblock with standardized brick towers, it was the Gas House District, a poor neighborhood from which 11,000 people — mostly of Eastern European descent — were evicted at the hands of Robert Moses (for the City) and the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (the developer) to make way for the the neighborhood as it is today. City rights of way were ceded to MetLife at no cost in what many criticized as a corporate giveaway.
Nevertheless, on the first day that the development accepted applications, 7,000 people applied. That number swelled to 100,000 by the time the first residents had moved in. Black applicants were excluded altogether.
The neighborhood became, as this podcast explains it, “an emblem of the Jim Crow north.” It took many years of activism — much of it by tenants whom MetLife tried to evict for speaking out — to change the racist policies. Incidentally, that is exactly the sort of activism that stable communities with long-term, invested residents make possible.
“Rent” from Last Week Tonight.
Last night, I finished this edition of the Newsletter just as John Oliver finished airing his segment on this country’s rental crisis, which is far from just a New York issue. With the caveat that I have not yet seen the whole thing, I offer it here as yet another (very timely) argument in the case for rent stabilization.