by Mathew R. Warren
On June 26, 2007 the Rent Guidelines Board voted 5 to 4 to allow increases of 5.75 percent on two-year leases and 3 percent on one-year leases of rent stabilized apartments in New York City.
In the last year 6,022 rent stabilized apartments were deregulated throughout the city. Since the Rent Regulation Reform Act of 1993, apartments with legal rents of $2,000 or more are eligible to be deregulated. The average rent for a one bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side in a building without a doorman is now $2400, according to The Real Estate Group New York.
At a public hearing two weeks before the board voted on rent increases, City Council Member Jessica Lappin spoke about the affect rising rents were having on her constituents.
“Although the Upper East Side is known as the silk stocking district, many of my constituents do not fit that stereotype,” Ms. Lappin said. “This crisis in affordable housing means that many tenants, including many of my constituents, would have no place to turn if they were priced out of their apartments. Rent stabilized housing is the only affordable housing resource left to these mostly low and moderate-income tenants.”
While existing residents are struggling to hold on to their affordable apartments, the Upper East Side is becoming off limits, not just to low and moderate income residents, but to any one not earning an upper class income. At Vertical City Realty, a brokerage that deals with apartments on the Upper East Side, Jordan Lerner, a broker, said landlords require apartment applicants to earn at least forty times the monthly rent in annual income.
“Unless you are making over $100,000 you are not going to be able to live anywhere near here,” Mr. Lerner said.
Many landlords with rent stabilized properties have been trying to do everything in their power to get their old tenants out and get their properties deregulated. Once tenants vacate stabilized apartments landlords can raise the rent 18%. Some tenants have come together to fight their landlords and protect their rights. One such group is the Shalom Tenants Alliance, a group made up of the tenants of one landlord who has become notorious for getting rent stabilized properties deregulated. On their website, shalomtenants.org, they explain how their landlord purchases relatively "cheap" rent-regulated buildings, many of which are on the Upper East Side, and then applies a variety of tactics to get the existing tenants out, accelerate turnover and rapidly deregulate apartments. The result, states the Shalom Tenants alliance, is that “previously stable apartment communities are transformed into dormitories.”
With only new luxury condos going up on the Upper East Side, like the two on 86th Street, and rental prices in the city growing last year by a record 8.3 percent, it seems the neighborhood’s fate is sealed. The once affordable apartments in walkup buildings have almost all been deregulated and the Upper East Side, like most of Manhattan, is quickly on its way to being exclusively for the wealthy.
Jimmy Cristiano, an admissions counselor at St. Johns University, feels very lucky that he was able to find his rent stabilized apartment on 86th Street and York Avenue two years ago, but worries that his $1800 rent will soon be over the limit for regulated apartments. When asked if he would be able to stay in the neighborhood when his rent goes over the $2000 limit, Mr. Cristiano, who grew up on the Upper East Side, said, “At my current salary, probably not.”
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