
NYC housing court, created to protect tenants, has become a tool for landlords - danso
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/20/nyregion/nyc-affordable-housing.html
======
beisner
I'm curious, and maybe this is not the right forum for this kind of
discussion, but it seems to me at some level there's going to be a tradeoff
between the ability of current tenants to afford their current housing and
newcomers to afford housing. In markets like NYC, where demand is ever-
increasing and for various reasons supply cannot keep up with demand,
maintaining rent-controlled apartments necessarily drives prices higher
overall. This prices a large group of people (especially the working-class
young) out of the market. At the same time, were landlords allowed to adjust
to market at-will, people who potentially have lived in a community for
decades could be displaced without notice. Both situations are undesirable,
since it would seem that someone gets screwed either way.

I've been wondering this for a while, but haven't come up with a satisfying
answer: to what extent do people have the right to live in a given community?
Does this depend on if people have lived in a community for some time? Does it
only depend on whether they can afford to live there? I feel like these
questions aren't black and white, but there's also no clear middle part I feel
comfortable committing to.

~~~
majormajor
I'd ask a slightly different question: why is so much of our economic policy
centered around new and higher paying jobs in a certain area, in disconnect
with the current residents preferences for housing policy? It seems like these
things are controlled by very different interests that end up fighting in ways
that treat the non-high-income/wealthy existing residents as collateral
damage.

We want housing to be more affordable in LA, [a different but still local] we
also want Amazon to come to town and bring in a bunch of new workers from out
of town. Those two goals seems hard to reconcile.

~~~
ex3ndr
We are started an a startup (Openland, W18) to find a way to product more
housing and during initial research i found that there are a lot of empty lots
in LA that costs about $10k-50k. Tried to search in different states and found
same lots at Long Island.

So why people are not trying to buy land and build something on it instead?
Buying a house will cost magnitude more than buying land and building your own
house. Building will take time and resources, but... paying for a loan for 30
years? I think i can spend two years building my own home for the fraction of
a cost of buying existing one.

Why no one is doing this?

~~~
scruffyherder
Pretty sure you can't just build a house in America. What about all the
zoning, permits, regulations, planning, environmental impact etc.

The paperwork alone would be a nightmare!

Housing has come a long way since the days of the mail-order Sears & Roebuck
assemble it yourself house.

~~~
ex3ndr
There are a lot of startups and services to solve this problems.
Unfortunately, This market is in its very early days.

------
chiefalchemist
The truth is, big real estate companies have the resources and the incentive
to be aggressive.

But perhaps that's the root of the problem? With so many units at below market
rates, the current new to the market units get priced to cover the "loss" of
the controlled units? And then of course there's the incentive.

I'm not defending the practice. But I am suggesting - similar to housing and a
college edu - that "government intervention" often has unintended
consequences.

~~~
knuththetruth
The government intervenes on behalf of Global Capital in the housing market
all the time, allowing them to turn a basic necessity (shelter) into a vehicle
for things like international money-laundering and finacialized speculation.

These are the circumstances that have created the housing crisis we have now
and previously took down the entire economy. I’m confused as to why you single
out trying to intervene on behalf of the average person over the wealthy as
the source of the problem when the “free market” term setting has caused the
massive distortions and unaffordablity.

~~~
ryanobjc
Common myth of the 'free market' \- the reality is the market is totally
constrained in many ways by the political and legal system.

There is definitely something very 'i am very smart'-like about tech nerds
defending 'the market' against any attempts of humanizing life. "um, actually
the free market will..."

Governments exist to provide super-market force. Safety regulation being kind
of a prime example, especially for employees. OSHA is anti-free market --
there should be no safety regulations, and let employees the freedom to choose
safety or pay and let the free market work it out.

Right?

~~~
pitaj
The market is very good at allocating resources, setting prices, and meeting
demand.

Countries with freer economies like Switzerland and Hong Kong have higher
standard of living on average. Countries which free up their economies have
higher relative standards of living after doing so. Countries which oppress
their economies have lower relative standards of living after doing so. (By
relative, I mean relative to the growth rates of neighboring countries and
before the changes, as standards of living rarely decrease absolutely).

~~~
linkregister
That said, those economies have some weird aspects to them. Both are small
states. Both have much lower proportions of their population in poverty than
larger states. Both are centers of global commerce.

In general I agree with you that markets allocate resources far better than
the most earnest central authorities. That said, market failures often happen
without regulation from governments.

------
Regardsyjc
Evictions destabilize neighborhoods and ruin lives.

Evicted by Matthew Desmond is a great book on this issue. It is infuriating
some of the predatory, senseless, ruthless, scumbag business practices that
slum lords use and crazy to discover that this is a recent development
starting from the 60s.

Also shout out to Justfix.nyc, a startup using tech to tackle this issue. One
of their projects is this website they made to help.

[https://www.evictionfreenyc.org](https://www.evictionfreenyc.org)

~~~
chiefalchemist
I read Evicted. Great book! A must read.

Word of advice to anyone who picks it up. Read the final chapter or two first.
It's where he gets into the weeds of the data and such. If you start at the
beginning and get bored, get distracted, give up, etc. before the end you're
going to miss the best part.

Don't get me wrong, the stories are great. But just the same it gets
disheartening, if not depressing.

~~~
Khol
I read this over christmas and was completely engrossed (to the extent of
being borderline antisocial).

I can certainly understand how you might find it disheartening and depressing,
but I don't know I could quite see bored. The retelling of the situations was
captivating, and the descriptions of how the system fails those most in need
was harrowing at times. I've been recommending it to anyone who will listen.

~~~
chiefalchemist
I'm not saying __I__ got bored :)

However, the truth is, plenty of books get started and are never finished.
Since the bit at the end was so factually important to the discussion of the
issue, I didn't want that to be missed.

Imho, he should have started there.

~~~
Khol
I'm certainly guilty of getting partway through books and never returning, but
I don't know that if I'd jumped into the data first I would have been so
engrossed.

(Obviously this is entirely a personal perspective.)

~~~
chiefalchemist
Engrossed? Maybe not. But a lot of myths would have been busted. For me, it's
about trying to understand an issue, bumping into some ignorant ahole, and
being able to say "read this book...read __this chapter__."

Few enjoy such books. But more need to be more aware of the (data) truths that
define the issue.

~~~
Regardsyjc
The data on the number of deaths from domestic violence in cities/states that
have a law for penalizing landlords with properties with too many police calls
was infuriating.

------
toomanybeersies
A similar thing has happened in New Zealand.

The Tenancy Tribunal exists to mediate disputes between the landlord and
tenants, both the landlord and the tenant can bring cases. For example,
landlords can use it to get tenants to pay for damage caused, and tenants can
use it to get the landlord to fix something they are legally obliged to fix.
The tribunal is non-biased, and the decisions they make tend to be fair.

The problem though is that all tenancy tribunal case are public. With the
names of the tenants and landlords published, as well as the case and the
outcome.

A lot of rental applications ask if you have ever been to the tenancy
tribunal, and a lot of real estate agents will search the tribunal records
(which go back 5 years) when you apply for a rental. It doesn't matter if you
were in the right or wrong, or if you won or lost. Landlords are reluctant to
rent to anybody that has been to the tribunal, as they are considered
troublemakers.

Because of this, tenants are scared to go to the tribunal, even for justified
cases, where they are in the right and would win. The opposite doesn't occur
for landlords because there is more demand than supply for tenants, and also
tenants often don't know that they can search the tribunal records.

------
chimeracoder
> Rent-regulated apartments, often the only homes in New York that people of
> modest means can afford, are vanishing as gentrification surges inexorably
> through the city’s neighborhoods

Rent regulation in NYC is easily the least effective way to make housing
affordable for people of "modest means". It's criticized even by advocates of
affordable housing for this reason. The only reason it still exists is because
there are a large number of tenants grandfathered into the system (over a
third of all NYC tenants) and that makes for a formidable voting bloc.

Rent control is all-but-gone - only a very small number of units are still
eligible, and that's because the tenant has lived there continuously since
1975. Rent stabilization is less broken, but still horribly broken. Anybody
can live in a rent-stabilized unit, regardless of whether or not they'd be
able to afford the market rents, and there's no effort made to make those
units available to people who can't afford market rents.

There are plenty of other programs in NYC, like Mitchell-Lama, which are much
more effective at providing affordable housing. Rent regulation is not one of
them.

~~~
busterarm
> since 1975

Early 1970, actually.

> Anybody can live in a rent-stabilized unit, regardless of whether or not
> they'd be able to afford the market rents, and there's no effort made to
> make those units available to people who can't afford market rents.

But there is a strong effort to eliminate these units. Most of the rent
stabilized inventory is not in desirable places to live. The rent can be
increased every two years.

The rent guidelines board has voted for a freeze only one time in its 49 year
history. On average the increase is 2% every vote and two increases of about
7.5% in the last 5 years. This interest compounds, obviously and also scales
up MCI rent increases for capital improvements.

Once your rent hits $2700/mo, you are no longer stabilized. If you actually
work out some examples, you'll find from this chart that rent stabilized
tenants have had their rent increased _at minimum_ by roughly 34% for two-year
leases in the last decade. If your landlord is anything like mine, it's
probably close to 45%.

[http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/rentguidelinesboard/pdf/guideline...](http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/rentguidelinesboard/pdf/guidelines/aptorders2018.pdf)

~~~
chimeracoder
> Once your rent hits $2700/mo, you are no longer stabilized.

That's actually not true. At $2700, landlords have the option to petition for
deregulation, but there's no guarantee that they'll succeed.

Under $2700, they can't petition for a high rent deregulation. The income
threshold also only kicks in at this threshold, so a unit rented for $2000 can
be occupied by a person who makes $500,000/year, and there's nothing that the
landlord can do about it.

In addition, I'd have to check, but I believe the increase for the two years
before DeBlasio was reelected was 0% for single-year leases.

~~~
busterarm
They don't have to bother with that, they just don't renew your lease or use
the court to evict you and the apartment automatically becomes unregulated.

I've seen this happen in building after building going on 20 years now.
Usually they just wait for a few tenants to hit around 2500/mo and then stop
renewing leases and let the vacancy rate pull the rents over the threshold for
them. It's really easy.

(Note: they also lowered the tenant's personal income threshold in 2015 to
~200k/yr for two consecutive years)

~~~
chimeracoder
> They don't have to bother with that, they just don't renew your lease

They are required to renew the leases of stabilized tenants.

> or use the court to evict you and the apartment automatically becomes
> unregulated.

Nope, the apartment is still regulated even if they re-rent it. They have to
go through the deregulation process through the courts if they want to take it
off rent regulations.

~~~
busterarm
> They are required to renew the leases of stabilized tenants.

Most public benefit programs in NYC require you keep on-file a current lease
agreement. Withholding a paper lease is a deliberate tactic to make people
choose between keeping their apartment and keeping their benefits.

I mean, we can keep doing this back and forth about where we agree on how
things should work and I'll agree with you, but then I can tell you about how
my family or I have been going to court with our landlord at least every other
year since the late 80s.

I am a rent controlled tenant in a 95% rent stabilized building and the
landlord does incredibly shady shit to try and get myself and others out. In
fact we're going through the regular "didn't pay rent" routine right now that
will bring me to court again probably this August or September -- the bank
checks that I send certified mail every month are being refused delivery by
the management company again.

~~~
namibj
The European way of paying rent, e.g. recurring wires, has the benefit that
the recipient can't just refuse the physical object. And for legally binding
documents the tenant has to deliver within a deadline, he can, if it's that
bad (at least in Germany), pay a court bailiff to deliver the document and
certify this delivery. That is legally binding on the date it is put in the
mailbox.

~~~
busterarm
I agree wholeheartedly and it seems like it would be nice to live in a
civilized part of the world like Germany instead of my city and country of
origin.

~~~
namibj
Move here. It's not that difficult if you want it, and have the skill needed
to find someone to marry. The legal system here is (almost) still 'rule of
law', and the constitutional court has a history of voiding the police state
laws that crop up. Well, unless you are in Bavaria. I'd advise against setting
foot on that state. The arrest laws there are about as bad as civil
forfeiture, except that they can at worst lock up what you have on you,
instead of being able to turn it into funds. Also you, once you are a citizen,
don't have to worry about your employer firing you or so, if you can sit that
out in a frugal lifestyle.

Landlords here actually like non-agressive social-benefits tenants, as the
rent get's wired directly by the state and the benefits won't pay for an
apartment in an expensive area anyway, which, combined with the apparently
rather liberal zoning, as far as high-rise buildings are concerned, makes the
situation rather bearable.

------
pg_bot
This is what happens when you have rent control in your city. Residents who
are lucky enough to live in under market housing become reluctant to move as
they will be unlikely to receive another apartment at the rate they currently
pay. Landlords have no reason to invest money back into buildings if they
cannot recoup the investment. Rent control is bad public policy and should go
the way of the dodo.[0]

[0] [http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/rent-
control](http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/rent-control)

~~~
busterarm
The data in NY shows pretty clearly that buildings with significant amount of
stabilized and controlled units get an outsized share of Major Capital
Improvements because that is the way you get your units to cross the
stabilization threshold.

~~~
darawk
Can I get a source on that? Asking honestly, i'm curious about how that might
work.

~~~
busterarm
I'll have to find it again but the MCI increase rate is capped at 6%/yr for
stabilized tenants for this very reason.

My landlord has hit between 4.8% and 6% every year without exception since
1991...for what? Besides the lobby I can't tell.

~~~
DrScump
I would think that _27 years_ of such capital investment, if genuine, would
result in _some_ tangible, visible effect.

------
chatmasta
The worst aspect of high rent costs in cities is that it forces a long commute
on the poorest residents. Those are the people who could benefit the most from
extra time in their day. These blue collar workers, who basically run their
city, have to live outside it and spend hours each day commuting into it after
a short night’s sleep. The long term health effects of such a routine are
terrible, and even worse for families.

------
AnimalMuppet
More generally: When you give the government more power, you can expect the
powerful to try to use it.

What? You thought that power was going to be used on behalf of the powerless?
That may have been the stated intent. But the powerful tend to know how to use
power better than the powerless do...

~~~
gowld
And if you don't give the government more powerful, you can expect the
powerful to grow their power unchecked.

~~~
taysic
Not at all - the gov often concentrates power because they make the laws. This
is what happens in regulatory capture - a company can ensure themselves a
monopoly / advantages through the right laws in a way they could never
guarantee in the free market.

------
jakelarkin
certainly its also dysfunctional that we legislate that random property owners
must provide the safety net for the poor & elderly.

~~~
romwell
>random property owners must provide the safety net

Doing business (which renting out property is) is not a given right. The cost
of doing business (taxes and regulations) is what makes possible the existence
of the state at all - far from being a 'dysfunctional' concept.

~~~
mobilefriendly
Doing business -- freely associating and voluntarily contracting with other
people to exchange goods and services -- is in fact a natural right. The state
is largely a parasite on top of this activity.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
That’s sometimes true, but I don’t think it must be. The state provides an
incredibly valuable service to those exercise that natural right: enforcement
and conflict resolution. It makes sense to fund the state to perform this
functions, and possibly others.

------
kevin_b_er
Large corporations have more resources than you. They will always attempt to
abuse the system to extract money from you or to abuse you.

Hopefully the NY Times names and shames these crimelords and their companies.

------
cascom
Not mentioned here - the imputed cost of easy eviction on rental
prices/ability to rent. I’ve lived in tenant friendly cities (NYC) and
landlord friendly cities (HOU). And guess what, its way easier to rent an
apartment in a state where it’s easier to get evicted. Perversely making it
hard to evict a tennat can make the hurdles to be being able to qualify for an
apartment to high for many people. I’m not saying that there should be no
protections, and as a renter i would prefer to have stronger protections, but
with those stronger protections come costs....

------
busterarm
I loved how NYC landlords sought a 7% increase on rent stabilized apartments
and the RGB voted them a 7.4% increase instead.

Meanwhile the vacancy rate on rent-stabilized apartments over $2000/mo is
7.42%...

------
dsfyu404ed
Meh. This sucks but what can you do.

When you have a government where corruption and dysfunction is is tolerated or
expected in some parts (police and MTA come to mind) that dysfunction
inevitably seeps in everywhere else given the time.

As another commenter said the big real estate companies have the resources to
work the system until they get what they want so as long as the system
supports sloppy decision making and incompetence they can just work the system
until they get the desired result.

Sure this is bad but it's not gonna change until the politicans apply
pressure. They won't do that unless someone with connections gets screwed and
makes it their mission to right the wrongs or something thrusts the issue into
the public eye. It will probably take someone going postal for this to be
thrust into the public eye because the people being screwed are mostly poor
and nobody cares about what poor people do unless there's violence involved.

Without the politicians to applying pressure no change will happen and they
won't apply pressure unless this affects people with connections or provokes
outrage. Unfortunately that's just how these sorts of governments usually
work.

------
StanislavPetrov
This entire problem can be explained with one line from the above essay:

>Punishable conduct is rarely punished.

As long as judges allow landlords to break the law without facing serious
sanctions, they will continue to do so. Its the same behavior that encourages
police officers to perjure themselves constantly on the stand and prosecutors
to hide evidence and perform other misconduct in the pursuit of criminal
convictions. In many cases throughout society, unfortunately, the law has
become nothing more than a tool for the wealthy and powerful to punish and
control the poor and powerless. Anyone interested in reading an excellent book
on this subject should check out Glenn Greenwald's _With Liberty and Justice
for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful_.

------
mrslave
Tomas Sowell's Basic Economics has a chapter on the failures of rent control,
specifically addressing New York City (among others).

These controls suffocate supply and now the owners of an artificially scarce
basic resource have a lot of power. It's not exactly a surprise.

------
misiti3780
I live in a Croman building now in the LES, it has been absolute tell since he
bought in 3 years ago.

------
kyrieeschaton
"Regulatory capture? What's that?"

~~~
wavefunction
"Nobody said freedom and Democracy were easy. You don't get to coast, enjoying
the fruits of all the hard labor that brought us to this point. You have to
maintain your institutions lest criminal elements in the corporate world or
elsewhere gain power."

Who are we quoting again?

------
noonespecial
_Even if a case is shown to be baseless, just being sued can hurt a tenant’s
ability to rent a new apartment._

We have this list, we have credit score lists, CLUE, and even sex offenders
lists... How about one more:

The "I'm a cartoon villain" list. If you, for example, evict a little old lady
in your greed for more rent even though your net worth exceeds some given
amount, you get added straight to the list. Because that's _cartoon_ level
villainy right there. That should follow you for life.

~~~
sigstoat
if the property is owned by a REIT, which is itself owned largely by retirees,
who exactly goes on the list?

(i just looked up a bunch of major REITs, and only EQR, Equity Residential,
has >1% ownership by insiders. despite that, it has ~96% institutional
ownership, with vanguard at 14.4%.)

~~~
noonespecial
As tempting as it is to just completely diffuse the blame and claim its
"nobody" or "the system", there are _humans_ at the tip of the spear. Even if
its just the lawyers who choose to take the case or the muscle who shows up to
do the eviction.

"I'm just doing my job" when you're obviously taking a helpless old lady's
home factors out to "I knew it was wrong, I just did it for the money".

Our loss of shame as a society and as individuals is truly dumbfounding.

~~~
perl4ever
Sounds like you might be interested in David Hogg's boycott of Vanguard,
albeit for different reasons.

To me, it's just tilting at windmills, but that seems to be becoming more
popular these days.

------
RickJWagner
I wonder if the Orbach Group has any ties to Jerry Orbach, 'Lenny' from Law
and Order and the father figure in 'Dirty Dancing'.

~~~
paulie_a
Fun fact he was known as "Mr Broadway" in his early career he performed in
numerous shows. Completely off topic but that really was the golden era of law
and order

