COURIER LIFE, MARCH 11-17, 2022 5
myriad supply chain issues distorting
the global economy.
Ann Korchak, president
of Small Property Owners of
New York and the owner of
two converted brownstones
in Manhattan each containing
ten units (which have
been in her husband’s family
for several generations), said
that most of her bills have increased
during the pandemic,
some quite dramatically, even
as rents dropped. She attributed
rising rents, especially
in units owned by small landlords,
to those increased costs
in addition to the restoration
of demand.
“I think the biggest factor
is right off the bat, you have to
look at this through the prism
of COVID. There were massive
rent decreases as the pandemic
went on,” Korchak noted. “But
we are seeing massive increases
in expenses also.”
Korchak said that her property
taxes have gone up this
year, and the city never provided
comprehensive property
tax relief as the state and federal
government did toward
evictions and mortgage payments.
She said that between a
third and half of rent revenue
is spent on property taxes alone
every year. Many other costs
have gone up as well, including
her insurance bill which has
increased 48 percent since last
year (compared to single digits
normally), along with her utility
bills: her gas bill is up 40
percent since 2019 and her electric
bill up an eye-popping 200
percent.
“It’s unsustainable,” Korchak
said. “We live in a world
where the landlord is vilifi ed
constantly. But other businesses,
when they have rising
costs, what they charge customers
goes up. And we just
don’t get looked at in the same
kind of lens. But the reality is
we do have these crazy massive
increases, and how are they to
be paid.”
But housing is the single
biggest expense for the vast majority
of households, and signifi
cant rent increases can lead
to either displacement or, if not
that, signifi cant dips in quality
of life for tenants dealing with
them.
Andy Mines, a guitarist living
in South Williamsburg with
a fellow musician roommate,
said that his landlord jacked up
his rent by $600, from $2,100 to
$2,700 when he signed his new
lease for 2022. He moved in last
January, taking advantage of
the pandemic price decrease to
downsize from two roommates
to one, and noted that when he
signed, the landlord had noted
that the price was low because
of COVID, but when pressed
they were told that the rent was
not likely to immediately jump
back to pre-pandemic levels the
following year.
With little recourse so soon
before the lease was up, Mines
and his roommate opted to resign
at the higher rate. But the
decision has had signifi cant
ramifi cations on Mines’ life
and fi nances. Most notably,
Mines had to quit his job at a
music school, and leave behind
his 17 guitar students, because
he couldn’t afford his new rent
on his old salary.
“I almost had to hire a lawyer
to arbitrate to get out of the
contract,” Mines said. “I said
look, I know I’m under the year
contract, but I have a crazy situation
where my rent went up
30 percent and I can’t pay my
rent with what this school pays
me.”
He’s now working at a new
school with higher pay, but has
to work more. “It was defi nitely
hard to say goodbye to the students,”
he said. “It’s been tough
having to adjust, this isn’t the
year I thought I was gonna
have, but now I just have to put
in a lot more work.”
Ethan Kogan, a fellow musician
who lives with a roommate
in Bushwick, said that the
landlord at his building on Hart
Street asked for $3,600 in rent
upon his Feb. 1 lease renewal
— up more than $1,000 from
the $2,200 he and his roommate
leased the place, with a basement
perfect for practicing music,
for in Feb. 2021. The landlord
allowed them a six-month
extension which lets them stay
in the apartment at current
rent until August, but a condition
of the extension was that
rent would go up to $3,600 upon
the start of the new lease.
Kogan says his landlord told
him that the rent needed to be
raised because the building’s
proprietors were struggling
throughout the pandemic, especially
as rents plummeted,
but he hardly empathizes, arguing
that it’s a question of
profi ts versus displacement.
“It’s a completely different
situation for him to be hurting
and for me to be hurting,” Kogan
noted. “For his bottom line
to be hurting versus my ability
to just make a few gains and
start building a little bit of savings
or even safety.”
The case for ‘good cause’
Landmark reforms to the
state’s rent laws, enacted in
2019, put in place signifi cant
barriers to a landlord’s ability
to evict a rent-stabilized tenant,
including through preferential
rents, vacancy decontrol, and
rent increases associated with
major capital improvements.
All of those loopholes allowed
landlords to raise rents on regulated
units well beyond the
percentage increase allowed in
a given year by the Rent Guidelines
Board, and frequently led
to displacement.
Unregulated tenants, on the
other hand, have few if any legal
protections from massive
increases. The Rent Guidelines
Board notes only that under
the 2019 reforms, landlords
are required to provide notice
to unregulated tenants if their
rent will increase by at least
5 percent, with an increasing
number of days notice required
the longer a tenant has lived in
the apartment. Otherwise, it’s
essentially a free-for-all.
“It’s not about recouping
losses. A lot of people are moving
into the city, so they are
deliberately displacing old tenants
to bring new tenants in,”
said Amadi Ozier, an organizer
with the Crown Heights
Tenants Union. “If developers
recognize an opportunity
to displace poor New Yorkers,
they’re gonna do it.”
Advocates with Crown
Heights Tenants Union and
other housing advocacy organizations
are pushing hard for
the State Legislature to pass
“good cause eviction,” which
would prohibit landlords from
evicting tenants unless they
have “good cause” such as nonpayment
or being a disruptive
tenant. More crucially, the bill
also caps rent increases for all
rental housing across the state
at 3 percent, and prohibits eviction
for nonpayment of “unreasonable”
bills beyond that
threshold. The bill has support
from the majority of Democrats
in both the Assembly and Senate,
but landlords have spent
millions of dollars lobbying to
prevent the bill’s passage.
Korchak, on the other hand,
says that to reduce the cost of
housing, the city should reform
its regulatory framework
that skyrockets the cost of doing
business in New York, as a
landlord or otherwise. She also
thinks the city should be building
a good deal more housing.
“We don’t have enough
housing at every level,” Korchak
said. “Low-income housing,
supportive housing, working
family housing, student
housing. That’s a big macro issue,
and that’s the problem. We
have so little housing because
of decades of poor planning.”
To Mines, one of the most
hurtful things about his situation
is that his loyalty to New
York City when things got
tough was not rewarded, and
in fact, the market is now “correcting,”
seemingly for the benefi
t of those who left in the fi rst
place.
“I think the thing that’s
messed up is like, I’ve been in
New York City, shopping at
New York restaurants, New
York grocery stores, chatting
up my deli owner Choco, going
to my pizza friend Giuseppe,”
Mines said. “I didn’t leave during
the pandemic when things
got tough. We were defi nitely
loyal to the city when things
got tough. Now when people
have fatter wallets, we’re not
being supported. It defi nitely
feels very conditional.”
The Bay Ridge Towers. File photo by Caroline Spivack