Landlord Heaven; Tenant Hell Rent Control Law May Lapse, Causing Rents To Skyrocket

If New Yorkers seem a bit crankier, a little more irritable than usual this spring, Jeffrey Brown knows why.

For 14 years, Brown has lived in a one-bedroom apartment on Manhattan’s West Side. For that privilege, he paid $916 - a large sum most places, but a bargain in New York’s vicious real estate market.

Brown’s lease was expiring, and his landlord, John Schreiber, had heard that rent control and regulation - the system that has kept a lid on city rents for a half century - was going to end. So he raised Brown’s rent.

To $4,000 a month for a one-year renewal.

Or, for a two-year renewal, $5,000 a month.

Of course, Schreiber jumped the gun a bit. The rent laws won’t lapse until June 15, and Schreiber was forced to send Brown a revised lease based on the current maximum allowable increase, 5 to 7 percent.

But the damage had already been done. A shudder passed from the West Side to the East Side and down to the Battery: Was this a preview of a world without rent control - a world of 400 percent rent hikes? “People are a combination of frightened and mad as hell,” said Martin Brennan of the Tenants & Neighbors Coalition.

In a city where it can take $2,000 a month to rent a 750-square-foot, one-bedroom, no-view apartment on the upper West Side, the specter of deregulation, combined with the tightest rental market in years, is unnerving to say the least.

Nonetheless, the stars are in alignment for change.

State Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, a Republican leading the decontrol effort, says “75 percent of the benefits from rent control go to about 20 percent of the people.”

Bruno has not closed the door to any compromise.

But the Democrats who control the other chamber of the Legislature, the Assembly, have refused any compromise so far - raising the prospect that nothing will be done by June 15, and rent control will expire.

Rent control advocates maintain that without regulations, Manhattan will become a place only the rich can afford.

“There is something about the city that would be destroyed,” said resident Kathy Marchael. “There’s a gritty quality that sort of makes it attractive.”

Deregulation advocates say the “gritty quality” comes from decaying properties that landlords have no incentive to maintain or improve.

Joseph Strasburg, president of the Rent Stabilization Association landlord group, said deregulation would give landlords profits and incentive to improve their properties and would encourage developers to build more new apartments.