Capital on ice

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Thursday the 26th of February. This is WORLD Radio and we thank you for joining us today. 

Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

First up on The World and Everything in It: New York’s rent fight.

Tonight, city officials open what New York City Mayor Zohran Momdani calls “Rental Ripoff Hearings”—inviting tenants to air their complaints.

REICHARD: But with more than 50,000 apartments sitting empty, landlords say they’re the ones being squeezed.

WORLD’s Lauren Smyth has the story.

LAUREN SMYTH: Hop into any taxicab in New York City, and the ads playing inside will be a quick reminder that life here is expensive.

TAXI RENTAL AD: If you’re looking to rent the same one-bedroom, the price will be $3,500 to $10,000 per month.

New Yorkers have a median household income of just over $80,000. Many would struggle to live here if it weren’t for the city’s Rent Guidelines Board, which sets rules to hold rents down.

The board regulates more than a million apartments—which is a lot, but not enough to meet demand. 

For renter Val Fleming, the shortage meant she had to wait more than a year just to hear back on her rental application.

VAL FLEMING: And then they called me and said, according to your statements, you make over the income for this particular housing development. And I was like "ugh!" And that really made me so upset, because I had waited for that one maybe a year before they even reached out to me. And then they turned me down.

Less than 1% of New York apartments are actually rent controlled, meaning the sticker price of the rent is held below a certain dollar amount. More commonly, they’re rent stabilized—a relic of nationwide World War 2 price control laws. Instead of capping the sticker price, the city caps annual increases. A decade ago, the maximum allowable increase was 0%—and since then, even when the increase was positive, it never exceeded inflation.

For the renters who can find an apartment and afford a long wait, those caps are good news. But they make it tough for landlords to cover rising maintenance and upgrade costs.

Pashko Lulgjuraj and his brother are Albanian immigrants who own six New York apartment buildings.

PASHKO LULGJURAJ: I think many owners these days would be happy to be making zero, breaking even, instead of digging in their pocket and running in the red. And the politicians know this, but they don’t care.

One of their rental units has been empty for seven years because the rent is capped at $700 per month—while repair costs have topped $100,000. They’ve joined a suit against the city, arguing that a 2019 law prohibiting rent increases after vacancy is an unconstitutional government taking.

LULGJURAJ: It’s not like we’re sitting back and delegating everything—‘Well, you know, you go collect the rents and fix that faucet and whatever’—and we’re sitting back under a palm tree with a piña colada. My brother rolls up his sleeves, and he’s out there you know, six, sometimes seven days a week, making repairs.

Bringing vacant apartments like Pashko’s to market wouldn’t solve the city’s housing shortage. But it could more than double the number of new units added to the NYC market annually.

So far, though, New York officials don’t seem interested in hearing from landlords.

ZOHRAN MAMDANI: We need to take on the indignities from those landlords who demand more than their fair share.

That’s Mayor Mamdani, gearing up for his Rental Ripoff hearings, where local tenants are invited to air their landlord horror stories on national television. 

Not pictured are landlords who can’t evict destructive tenants. Louis Calemine is a local real estate broker who says he experienced the difficult legal process firsthand:

LOUIS CALEMINE: So on Staten Island, it took us 13 months to evict somebody who didn’t make any other claim other than he doesn’t want to pay anymore. Wrecking the house, flooding the house. Only in crazy, whacked-out New York City does very little leash to a non-paying tenant—destructive tenant—equal 13 months of free cheese.

A raw deal for landlords, that may not help tenants either. If landlords can’t bring their units to market, it’s one less apartment available. 

Other price-reduction efforts, like Mamdani’s plan to freeze rents with no increases for four years, could leave even less cash for landlords to cover regular maintenance and upgrades. And renter Val Fleming says she’s already seeing grocery prices go up, as stores are starting to close in rent-stabilized neighborhoods:

FLEMING: New York City is very expensive already, and even though you’re freezing the rent, that’s great—but then, what is it going to cost us in other areas of our life?

Still, those costs haven’t deterred everyone. The city’s most recent data shows an annual growth of 87,000 people —making New York a growth leader among major U.S. cities.

For WORLD, I’m Lauren Smyth in New York City.

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