Bill Thompson is calling on the mayor’s Rent Guidelines Board to freeze rents at existing levels and reject the unaffordable rent increases it has proposed when it votes on June 23.
“Our City has become unaffordable for a vast number of its residents,” Thompson said. “In Bedford-Stuyvesant or Bushwick, for example, a family making the median income for the neighborhood would need to spend two-thirds of that income to rent a three-bedroom apartment. In Washington Heights, Kingsbridge or Brownsville, it would cost three-quarters of their income; in Harlem or Mott Haven, that same family would spend 100 percent of its income on rent.
“This is not only inappropriate, it’s unconscionable,” Thompson said. “It also illustrates the unfortunate inclination of the members of the Board, and the Mayor at whose pleasure they serve, to disproportionately burden families who are least able to afford these increases.”
Thompson is also calling on the mayor’s RGB to reject the proposed ‘Poor Tax’ supplement on families paying $1000 or less in rent. “This ill-advised measure, adopted by the Board last year with little discussion, is already contributing to the tragic and unacceptable loss of affordable housing in NYC. Tenants living in apartments renting for $1000 or less are overwhelmingly people of color, and have a median income of only $30,000, meaning they cannot afford more than $750/month based on the federal hardship level of 30% of income going to rent.”
“It is long overdue for the Board to abandon its bias toward landlords and address the severe hardships that confront our City’s low- and moderate-income tenants as well as our City’s middle class,” Thompson wrote. “The simple fact is that our City has become unaffordable for a vast number of its residents.”
Thompson further stressed that, since the City has not kept pace with the rapidly diminishing availability of affordable housing stock, rent-stabilized housing is the only affordable housing resource left to many New Yorkers.
“Once families have been priced out of their apartments, there will be no other options,” he said. “Escalating costs affect all New Yorkers; however, it is beyond dispute that these costs fall disproportionately on our City’s many low- and moderate-income tenants. New York’s future depends upon each of our efforts to ensure that middle class families can afford to live here.”
Similarly, Assemblyman Keith Wright has spoken out agains Bloomberg’s proposal for the working homeless to pay rent. “The idea that New Yorkers prefer to stay in shelters is ludicrous and forcing our most vulnerable population to pay rent to stay in shelters undermines any effort to create lasting economic change within our society. I am overjoyed that my colleagues in the State Assembly came together in support of this legislation, which will help the working poor of our neighborhoods raise themselves upward towards prosperity,” said Assemblyman Keith Wright of Harlem, Chairman of the State Assembly Standing Committee on Social Services.
Posted on June 22, 2009 by D. Bell