A new wind is blowing in New York and it’s getting chilly for the city’s real estate kings. On Tuesday, the Senate of the state of the same name passed what is probably the most far-reaching package of tenant protection in decades. The loopholes in the rental price brake, with which owners were able to bypass the state-determined maximum price increase for years, are gone. For the approximately 2.4 million New Yorkers who live in apartments protected by the rent brake live, it is an urgent business. Between 2010 and 2017, the city’s rental prices rose twice as fast as the average income of its residents.
Actually, around one million apartments are protected from such radical price increases by the brakes. Recently, landlords were only allowed to raise annual rents by a maximum of 1.5 percent. But after years of deregulation, in which both Republicans and moderate Democrats like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo opened the doors to real estate representatives, numerous rules of exception emerged.
If the rental price of an apartment exceeded a certain price hurdle, it was, for example, exempted from the rental price brake. And if a sheltered apartment was vacant in the meantime, increases of as much as 20 percent were allowed for a new rental agreement. This is over under the new rules.
The change of heart came in November when in Albany, the state capital, the Democrats regained a majority in both chambers after decades. A wave of left-wing candidates who primarily addressed tenants, workers and low-wage earners in their election campaigns was largely responsible for the victory.
But the problem does not only affect the hippest areas of the city, where young, predominantly white hipsters overrun long-established working-class neighborhoods, often largely inhabited by Latinos, blacks and other minorities. East Harlem, Queens, Chinatown: no part of the city is safe, and once you get started there is no stopping. This can be clearly seen in Williamsburg in Brooklyn: real estate moguls are now pulling up one luxury building after another.
What does that do to a city when entire areas become exclusive playgrounds for the rich, and those who once made them special are increasingly marginalized? It is a question that is asked not only in New York, but also in San Francisco, in Los Angeles, in Seattle, in London, in Berlin, in Frankfurt. And everywhere the reaction seems to be the same: it makes you angry. In New York they put this anger on the ballot. For the Republicans but also for the Democrats, the message was clear. The latter have even distanced themselves from the real estate representatives in recent weeks.
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