4 MAY 23, 2019 RIDGEWOOD TIMES WWW.QNS.COM
Lawmakers united on rent control
BY MAX PARROTT
MPARROTT@SCHNEPSMEDIA.COM
@RIDGEWOODTIMES
The Ridgewood Tenants Union
(RTU) held a town hall for
residents on Saturday with
local elected officials about the
gentrifying neighborhood’s housing
issues as the state Legislature
prepares to consider a package of
universal rent control bills expected
to get a vote before the session ends
in June.
The fi ve legislators who came to the
event – state Senators Julia Salazar
and Mike Gianaris and Assembly
members Catherine Nolan, Mike Miller
and Brian Barnwell – all have publicly
demonstrated their support the suite
of rent control bills. At the May 18
meeting, they discussed future plans
for additional tenants rights laws, and
explained the resistance to the most
controversial of the current bills: the
good cause eviction law.
Though the mood between
Ridgewood residents and politicians
was congenial for the majority of the
event, it dramatically shift ed at the
end when the organizers of the event
confronted Nolan about her support
for Amazon’s Long Island City campus.
What started as a show of political unity
then splintered into in-fi ghting in its last
moments due to the lingering eff ects of
the Amazon deal.
Ridgewood state Senator Joe Addabbo
was absent from the town hall, although
members of the tenants union confi rmed
that they had invited him during their
visit to Albany on May 14 to rally for the
rent control legislation.
“Many of members of RTU are
suff ering one way or another, either
harassment, or MCI increases or other
illegal ways of raising of the rents. The
people that formed this union are
fi ghting because they are fi ghting on
their own for their stuff as well,” said
RTU organizer Hilda Coll-Valentin.
The forum began with a series of
speakers who related housing struggles
related to the protections that are at
stake in the legislation. A small landlord,
a role that opponents of the bills argue
would be hurt by their passage, said
that he believes these laws will help
landlords like him who would like to
keep their tenants’ rents reasonable.
Another resident said that he had
recently been given only 30 days’
notice that he was being evicted from
his apartment of 31 years because his
landlord passed it on to a family member
who wanted to sell it immediately.
Gianaris responded that this issue
fell under the purview of an additional
law he has in the works that would
stop landlords from being able to evict
tenants in order to off er housing to
their family.
A resident said that aft er a private
equity firm that owns 29 other
properties bought her building they
informed her and her husband that
they would be raising her rent from
preferential rates to the legal rate.
Though the woman applied for the
Senior Citizen Rent Increase Exemption
program, her rent was still frozen at the
legal rate, which involved a 35 percent
From left, Assemblyman Brian Barnwell, state Senator Mike Gianaris
Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan and Assemblyman Mike Miller talked to
residents. Photo: Max Parrott/QNS
increase from her preferential rate.
“Preferential rents are designed to
explode, creating exorbitantly high rent
increases so that landlords can push out
working class people whenever they
want,” she said.
When the forum opened up to
the questions from the audience, a
member of RTU asked why the bill that
Salazar sponsored prohibit the eviction
without good cause is reported to be
encountering the most resistance of all
the bills in the legislature.
“It’s on me and it’s on us as a movement
to make sure that all the assembly
members and senators are informed
about what the bill actually does,”
Salazar said. “What makes it a heavier
lift is that it’s a new bill, and people are
unfamiliar with it.”
Since several of the other bills in the
package had been proposed previously
before the Democrats had control of
both chambers, the legislators had more
familiarity with them than they did to
the good cause eviction bill.
Gianaris added that another reason
for the friction on the good cause
eviction bill is that it’s the only one of the
nine bills that would provide protection
to people who are not rent-regulated.
“So I think that’s also generating
additional opposition from the real
estate industry,” he said.
Discord began when members of
the tenants union and Democratic
Socialists of America pressed Nolan
on her refusal to take a pledge that the
organization’s Housing Justice for All
coalition to sign a pledge to support rent
control legislation and refuse donations
from real estate.
Nolan asserted that she has always
been in favor of rent control legislation,
adding that the reason that she did
not sign the pledge was that she has a
practice of not signing pledges before
legislation is proposed in order to make
sure it’s not compromised.
“I’m not the candidate of the real estate
industry, believe me. By and large, I’ve
been elected on very small amounts of
money,” Nolan added.
Aft er that, Raquel Namuche, an RTU
organizer, continued the pressure on
Nolan by presenting her with a stack
of anti-Amazon postcards that the
organization collected after Nolan
came out in support of the deal. Many
of the letters connected constituents’
concerns about the HQ2 proposal to
housing issues.
Nolan immediately stood up to rebut
this challenge to her record.
“For any elected offi cial, we have to
put our judgement as to what we think
is best based on conversations with
everyone. For some of you, my support
of that proposal is a deal breaker. So if
you want to boo, that’s your right. But
many other people didn’t feel that way,”
she said.
Aft er the event, Namuche told QNS
that she had made the decision to
confront Nolan about Amazon because
she believes the housing issues at stake
in the legislation to be connected to
those raised by the Amazon deal, which
fell apart in February.
“We need to trust that when it comes
time to vote, our electeds will be on our
side,” tweeted the RTU.
Ridgewood goes walking for children’s hospital
Members of the Kiwanis Club of Ridgewood, NY 3-2-1 joined in the May 19 walkathon at Crocheron Park in
Bayside to benefi t the children at St. Mary’s Children’s Hospital. The members and friends donated over $2,000
for the second year in a row. In addition, the members donated 20 sets of bedding for the newly completed
Long Term Care Wing at the hospital. Photo courtesy of Bob Monahan
link
/WWW.QNS.COM
link
