Remarks as Prepared to the Rent Guidelines Board

Good afternoon members of the Rent Guidelines Board. I am Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito. I am the Council Member for the 8th District, which includes El Barrio/East Harlem and the South Bronx.

The affordable housing crisis is deeply impacting almost every household in the city. This is a challenge we must face head on — it cannot be solved unless we commit to ending the distressing loss of our existing stock of affordable housing. This means not just preventing further deregulation of apartments, but also ensuring that rent stabilized apartments are in fact affordable. Unfortunately, the rent guidelines handed down since the Great Recession began have worked to undermine this goal.

That is why I am calling for a rent freeze this year.

New York City was hit especially hard by the recession and is yet to fully recover, with incomes still down and an unemployment rate at least a point higher than the national. Despite this, the Rent Guidelines Board has handed down sizeable rent increases every year since the recession began. In the face of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the Board protected landlords’ profit margins even as tenants in regulated apartments were, on average, getting by with less.

Since 2007, landlords’ net operating income has grown by 32 percent, whereas their costs only grew by half as much. Two years ago, landlords enjoyed their largest year-to-year increase in operating income since the Giuliani era. Yet tenants’ median household income fell by three percent from 2007 to 2010.

This city is becoming increasingly unaffordable for the working families who are its lifeblood. Half of all renting households, including 81 percent of low-income households, are rent burdened. Nearly a third of all renting households are severely rent burdened, meaning they pay at least half of their gross income in rent. The consistent rent hikes of the past seven years mean that more and more tenants of stabilized units are becoming rent burdened, let down by the promise of rent regulation and forced to choose between paying their rent on time and putting food on the table.

Rent stabilization is crucial to maintaining the racial and economic diversity of our neighborhoods. Over 60 percent of rent stabilized tenants are people of color, and their median income is almost a third lower than tenants in market rate apartments. In the past decade alone, Manhattan has lost a fifth of its rent regulated units. This trend, coupled with rent hikes that make even stabilized units unaffordable for low-income New Yorkers, threatens the vibrancy and integration of New York’s neighborhoods.

New Yorkers in rent regulated housing have suffered more rent increases than they can bear during a time of great economic hardship. While I am proud that the Council recently passed legislation to expand the income cap for the SCRIE program, which freezes rents for seniors in rent-regulated apartments whose rent exceeds one third of their income, I ask you to consider before you vote the working people who have gone years without a raise and the families who have no choice but to pack five or six people into two bedrooms. I ask you to consider these people and vote for a rent freeze this year.

###