December 1, 2025
Don’t simply freeze the hire of rent-stabilized items. Don’t permit their demolition in any respect.
Pricey Mayor Mamdani,
Congratulations in your win. Many New Yorkers are relying on you to speed up the event of inexpensive housing. However what about saving from demolition the prevailing hire stabilized items which might be being torn all the way down to make means for luxurious housing? This can be a little acknowledged development. You now have the chance to cease this severe and steady loss.
The citywide group, the Campaign for a Livable City, (I’m a member) has been making an attempt to name consideration to this. The marketing campaign consists of inexpensive housing advocates, group organizers, parks defenders, historic preservationists. Metropolis Council members Gale Brewer (higher West Facet), Christopher Marte (Decrease East Facet) and Sandy Nurse (Brooklyn) additionally acknowledge this and are planning to confront it. Plans are within the works to submit a invoice to the Metropolis Council to require builders to interchange on web site the identical variety of inexpensive housing items that they tear down. However this might take time to get via the Council.
As an alternative, mayor elect, you could possibly have a direct impression. Don’t simply freeze the hire of hire stabilized items; don’t permit their demolition in any respect. Require new condo towers to comprise the identical variety of inexpensive items on web site that get torn all the way down to make room for them. Require the hire to be comparable. That might, no less than, cease the lack of current inexpensive items whilst you do the whole lot doable to construct new inexpensive housing.
This hidden loss is going on all around the metropolis, however it isn’t acknowledged. It already occurred alongside 4th Avenue in Brooklyn during the last decade. Nobody actually seen as a result of nobody was monitoring the loss. Just one group, the FRIENDS of the Higher East Facet Historic Districts in Higher Manhattan’s Yorkville, has been tracking this trend since 2007 and making an attempt to publicize probably the most egregious losses. Traditionally, Yorkville was as soon as the primary dwelling on this metropolis for scores of immigrants. Now it’s dwelling to a terrific ethnic number of working households and younger profession builders. For a lot of of them, these one-time tenements, most frequently rent-stabilized, are their final likelihood to afford to remain in New York Metropolis. They’re being pushed out.
Yorkville occurs to be the place probably the most egregious examples exist. That higher East Facet neighborhood occurs to have such a excessive focus of those former tenements due to its historical past as a refuge for immigrants…
Present Challenge
For instance:
On Third Avenue and East seventy fifth Avenue, 43 inexpensive items and 4 business items on the bottom flooring are being changed by 38 high-end residences in a brand new luxurious constructing of unknown top, with no business items on the bottom flooring.
At 1045 Madison Avenue, 14 luxurious items changed 4 row homes with 13 inexpensive items and 9 business tenants. The business areas misplaced had been occupied by small native companies.
At 355 East 86th Avenue, an intact, pristine row of 4-story upgraded redbrick tenements with road stage shops was demolished for a 23-story luxurious high-rise with unknown variety of luxurious residences, none inexpensive.
On the Higher West Facet, 15 West 96th Avenue, a 321-foot tower with 21 costly condos changed three 5-story townhouses with 30 rental items.
The occupants of those misplaced residences are simply the type town is shedding to the suburbs or New Jersey. They haven’t any alternative.
Fashionable
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Yorkville is simply the poster little one for this phenomenon. A 2020 research of inexpensive housing loss by George M. Janes & Associates of simply Manhattan hire stabilized items from 2007 to 2020 exhibits a web lack of 14,438 stabilized items on the Higher East Facet and 11,127 stabilized items on the Higher West Facet, the 2 highest among the many group board research areas. However each Manhattan neighborhood confirmed a loss with a complete of 37,466 items web loss general. No research has but been manufactured from the opposite boroughs. The latest Midtown South rezoning opens further floodgates for this development. The world is stuffed with distinguished outdated condo buildings stuffed with stabilized items on areas now zoned for brand spanking new luxurious towers.
There may be one other economically and socially tragic loss on this development. Small local businesses, some run by households for generations, are additionally falling underneath the wrecking ball. What replaces them, if something, is all the time a nationwide chain not the native companies that neighborhood residents rely on and that immediately profit town’s financial system, not the nationwide one.
Builders argue that hire stabilized buildings aren’t financially sustainable. However they arrive with all types of tax advantages and all the time appear to discover a purchaser. You understand how many hire will increase they’ve been awarded lately. It’s by no means sufficient, they are saying.
How does constructing multi-millionaire luxurious residences anyplace within the metropolis handle NYC’s inexpensive housing disaster? It doesn’t. Trickle down has NEVER labored.
On prime of all this, publicly funded protection legal professionals, desperately wanted by dispossessed tenants, are highly underfunded by town. The price range for them has been drastically reduce underneath the present administration.
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