As Sunset Nears for Rent Control Law, Big Apple Tenants Grow Edgy

NEW YORK — If New Yorkers seem a bit crankier, a little more irritable than usual this spring, Jeffrey Brown knows why.

For 14 years, Brown has lived in a one-bedroom apartment on Manhattan’s West Side. For that privilege, he paid $916--a large sum most places, but a bargain in New York’s vicious real estate market.

Brown’s lease was expiring, and his landlord, John Schreiber, had heard that rent control and regulation--the system that has kept a lid on city rents for a half century --was going to end. So he raised Brown’s rent.

To $4,000 a month for a one-year renewal.

Or, for a two-year renewal, $5,000 a month.

Of course, Schreiber jumped the gun a bit. The rent laws aren’t scheduled to lapse until June 15, and Schreiber was forced to send Brown a revised lease based on the current maximum allowable increase, 5% to 7%.

But the damage had already been done. A huge shudder passed from the West Side to the East Side and down to the Battery: Was this a preview of a world without rent control--a world of 400% rent hikes?

“People are a combination of frightened and mad as hell,” said Martin Brennan of the New York State Tenants & Neighbors Coalition.

In a city where a 750-square-foot, one-bedroom, no-view apartment on the Upper West Side can command a rent of $2,000 a month, the specter of deregulation, combined with the tightest rental market in years, is unnerving to say the least.

Nonetheless, the stars are in alignment for change.

State Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, a Republican leading the decontrol effort, maintains that “75% of the benefits from rent control go to about 20% of the people. . . . We have created a situation where people now see it as an entitlement.”

Bruno has not closed the door to any compromise, and he has pledged that the elderly, disabled and poor would be protected. Republican Gov. George Pataki has suggested removing rent protection for tenants whose income is more than $175,000 a year.

But the Democrats who control the other chamber of the Legislature, the Assembly, have refused any compromise so far, raising the prospect that nothing will be done by June 15 and rent control will expire.

This, said longtime resident, Kathy Marchael, would probably force her to leave the city next year, when the lease is up on her $1,100-a-month, two-bedroom, rent-stabilized apartment in Greenwich Village.

“I’m a New Yorker by choice, not by birth,” said Marchael, 49, who lives with a grown daughter and works for a nonprofit agency. “I came here because I visited the city and loved it. Middle-class people should be able to afford to live in the city.”

But just the mention of “rent control” was enough to start an argument with a stranger at a Fifth Avenue bus stop.

“I hope that it gets defeated,” said the other woman, who owns a co-op on the East Side and declined to give her name. “I think there’ll be a couple of years of chaos, then it’ll level itself out.”

The woman said she knows a well-to-do doctor paying $1,250 a month for a three-bedroom East Side apartment a block from Central Park.

Rent control has been a fact of New York life since it was enacted as a temporary curb on profiteering during the post-World War II housing pinch.

About three-eighths of the city’s housing is rent-regulated--1.1 million apartments with 2.7 million tenants. Strict rent control applies in 71,000 apartments built before 1947. The rest are rent-stabilized, which means rent increases are limited to percentages set each year by the city’s Rent Guidelines Board.

“Luxury decontrol” was enacted in 1994, spurred by landlord complaints that well-off personalities, such as Ed Koch, Mia Farrow, Lauren Hutton and Carly Simon, were dwelling in luxury for a relative pittance. The law lifted controls on apartments that rent for more than $2,000 a month and whose residents make more than $250,000 a year.

Landlords say that didn’t go nearly far enough. But Brennan says the landlord lobby is flogging the rare cases of well-heeled tenants with large, cheap apartments in a cynical push for higher profits.

“The reality is that the vast majority of people who live in rent-controlled housing in the metropolitan area are working class and middle class and poor people,” Brennan said.

In 1995, according to the city, 5% of the tenants in rent-stabilized households had an annual income that exceeded $100,000 and 40% had an annual income of less than $20,000. The median was $25,300.

Rent control advocates maintain that without regulations, Manhattan will become a place only the rich can afford.

“There is something about the city that would be destroyed,” Marchael said. “There’s a gritty quality that sort of makes it attractive.”

Deregulation advocates say the “gritty quality” comes from decaying properties that landlords have no incentive to maintain or improve. Joseph Strasburg, president of the Rent Stabilization Assn.--a landlords’ group--said deregulation would give landlords profits and incentive to improve their properties and would encourage developers to build more new apartments.

And the landlords say the experiences of other cities that have decontrolled rents--Boston, for example--show that it can be done without mayhem.

Tenants are reluctant to take that on faith. And the battle is breaking along urban-rural lines; after all, the leader of the decontrol effort, Bruno, represents upstate Rensselaer County.

In a recent letter to the Glen Falls Post-Star, Manhattanite Neile Weissman vowed that city tenants would boycott upstate farm products if rent controls were allowed to expire.

“No Rent Laws, No Cheddar,” Weissman titled the letter.