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August 24, 2023

Want To End Apartment Warehousing? Ease Up On Rent-Control Laws

New York City’s Independent Budget Office this week reported that some 13,000 rent-regulated apartments in the city have been vacant for more than two years — fueling the charge that owners are deliberately “warehousing” apartments to pressure legislators to ease limits on rent increases.  A group called the End Apartment Warehousing Coalition, comprising 22 tenant organizations, supports…

August 23, 2023

Solve Two Crises At Once: Put Migrants In NYCHA

As New York City gives over soccer fields and recreation centers to housing for a wave of migrants, and Gov. Hochul feuds with Mayor Adams, one public housing resident on the Lower East Side has a better way. The New York Times reports that Camille Napoleon “has hosted as many as 12 migrants at a time in…

August 13, 2023

The Bill to Repair NYCHA Projects Doubles—but Pols Won’t Fix the System

We knew Big Apple public housing is in dangerously bad shape—but it turns out it’s twice as bad as we thought. New York City Housing Authority officials just revealed the $40 billion estimated in 2017 for the new roofs, pipes and boilers the aging projects need has ballooned to $78 billion. Yet a state plan billed…

August 5, 2023

Rent Control ‘Shabbifying’ NY’s Housing As Owners Feel the Squeeze

Perhaps cowed by tenant protests, the Rent Guidelines Board has backed off rent increases of as much as 16% (for two-year leases) for the city’s 900,000-plus rent-regulated apartments. That property owners should be limited to modest hikes (2.5% for one-year leases), even as their costs of fuel, taxes and repairs go up, ignores the fact that inflation…

July 30, 2023

26 Miles of Scaffolding Blights NYC’s Public Housing, Some Up for 10 Years

No New York pedestrian would disagree with Eric Adam’s characterization of the city’s ubiquitous sidewalk sheds at stalled construction sites as “ugly little green boxes.”  But his targeting of private buildings owners with $10,000 a month fines for scaffolding that stays up for more than 90 days without building repairs proceeding also suggests selective prosecution. …

July 25, 2023

Not Just Tulsa

Earlier this month, an Oklahoma judge ruled that the City of Tulsa cannot be held legally or financially responsible for the actions of the violent mob that burned down the city’s Greenwood section, known as the Black Wall Street, in 1921. Three survivors of that murderous riot will not, it appears, receive compensation. Despite their disappointment, the…

July 19, 2023

Adams’ Smart Migrant Move Could Help the City’s Overburdened Shelters—and Migrants Themselves

A hint of common sense has emerged in the Adams’ administration policy toward the wave of migrants crowding the hotels once occupied by the tourists the city’s economy needs. But the mayor’s just-announced 60-day limit for single adults in the city’s shelter system raises the obvious question: Where should they go next?  There’s a short…

July 17, 2023

Biden Tries to Revive His Eviction Moratorium Through the Back Door

The federal overreach that was part of the Covid pandemic response included a ban on residential evictions, ordained by, of all agencies, the Centers for Disease Control. Ultimately, the Supreme Court slapped down a Biden-administration effort to extend the ban — which had no serious public-health basis. But that has not stopped the White House from…

July 12, 2023

New York Rent Control: Could the End be Near?

Those who care about housing policy and the future of New York City will be paying close attention this fall to see if the Supreme Court decides to take up a serious challenge by apartment owners to the Big Apple’s big blunder: rent regulation. At stake is a law which regulates rent prices and tenant rights for…

June 24, 2023

City Can No Longer Afford Life-Long Subsidies for Lucky NYCHA Tenants

If the definition of insanity involves doing the same thing repeatedly and hoping for a different result, maybe the long-troubled New York City Housing Authority, the nation’s largest, isn’t entirely insane after all.  Rather than pouring yet more money into repairs of the crumbling Fulton and Elliot-Chelsea Houses, among the nation’s oldest public-housing projects, NYCHA…