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Rent Regulation Awaits Its Fate


State and local officials are preparing to chart the future of rent regulation in New York City. Several forthcoming decisions and votes will determine large-scale changes, such as whether former Mitchell-Lama apartments will move into rent stabilization, and smaller ones, such as how much stabilized rents can increase this year.

First, the Rent Guidelines Board is ramping up to determine this year's allowable increases for leases on rent regulated apartments. The nine-member board, composed of a chairman, two landlord representatives, two tenant representatives, and four public members, will consider owners' operating costs, terms and availability of financing, cost of living indices, and testimony from landlords, tenants, experts, and elected officials.

They will use annual reportsgenerated by their own researchers such as the Price Index of Operating Costs, The Mortgage Survey, and the Housing Supply Report. They will also do their own calculations, get extra analysis of the numbers, and consider what landlords and tenants have to say at their public meetings. Then, they will distill all of the information down, and make a decision.

Last year, the board allowed two percent increases for one-year leases and four percent increases for two-year leases, even though landlords' costs had gone down from the previous year. This year, landlords are claiming that high fuel prices and increased property taxes warrant double digit increases. Tenants will fight to bring that number down, but some think the final compromise will be higher than tenants have seen in a long time. Increases over the past decade have averaged about three percent for one-year leases and five percent for two-year leases.

The board was expected to start its work in March, but some last minute changes postponed their first meeting. Mayor Michael Bloomberg decided to replace five board members, and the background checks of his new appointees took longer than expected. The current meeting schedulebegins in April and runs through mid-June, when board members will cast their final vote.

Meanwhile, the City Council has weighed in on rent regulation, in largely symbolic resolutions, since, under the current structure, state laws run the show. [See Gotham Gazette articles on rent regulation and the battle over rent regulation.] On March 12th, the council voted to renew the city's rent stabilization law though April 1, 2006. It also passed two resolutions that would try to influence the state legislature, as it reconsiders rent laws which will expire on June 15th.

One resolutionurges the state legislature to repeal the Urstadt Law, which was passed in 1971 and handed state legislators control over rent regulation by forbidding the city from making any rent laws that are stricter than the state's.

The Council resolution says, "the regulation of these rent stabilized and rent controlled dwelling units is more appropriately a matter of local concern and should be subject exclusively to decisions made by the Mayor and the City Council." It also says that the Urstadt law prevents the city from "exercising home rule over an issue of vital local importance."

The other resolutionsupports the State Assembly's passage of a bill that would renew rent regulation until 2008 and alter certain elements of the 1997 laws that regulation proponents dislike.

The bill would eliminate high rent vacancy decontrol, which has deregulated apartments that rent for $2000 or more upon vacancy. Critics have said that nearly 100,000 apartments have been deregulated under this provision, and it could eventually dismantle rent regulation as a whole. The bill would also drop the allowable increase in rent for vacant apartments from 20 percent to 10 percent, and extend rent stabilization to former Mitchell Lama developments and former Section 8 housing developments. Finally, it would stop landlords from abusing the provision of the law that allows apartments to be removed from rent regulation for personal use.

The Assembly passed the bill in early February, and the City Council called upon the State Senate and the governor to sign it into law. The bill has been introduced into the State Senate by a few Republican senators who represent districts in New York City. It now sits with the Senate committee on Housing, Construction, and Community Development. It is not likely to be supported by many other Senate Republicans, who have said they want to keep the rent regulation laws as is, and who comprise the majority in the Senate. And Majority Leader Joe Bruno has said he will not touch rent regulation until the legislature passes a budget.

More than one million households under rent regulation are awaiting the final decisions with no small amount of anxiety. And while tenant advocates see the current bills as a strong starting point for the inevitable negotiation among Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Bruno, and Governor Pataki, they also know, from long experience, that anything could happen.

Rebecca Webber is a journalist who has covered housing issues for Gotham Gazette since July 2000.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bringing Sand to the Brooklyn Beach


On a March day when the temperature touched 70 degrees in Brooklyn for the first time since last fall, the United States Army Corps of Engineers presented a new plan at a public meeting in Coney Island to bring sand to a beach. They showed aerial photographs of Coney Island beaches that appeared wide and full, while, just to the west, there was a severely depleted beach near the gated community of Seagate.

The corps, the federal agency responsible for maintaining the nation's shores and navigation channels, wants to restore the level of sand at the Seagate beach to the way it was 15 years ago, and shore up a large pile of rocks at West 37th Street, known as a "groin," that holds sand in place for Coney's Island public beaches. Groins can be many hundreds of feet long and several feet high. The corps proposal calls for the construction of four groins at the southwest tip of Coney Island near Seagate, which will then trap and hold sand along the Seagate beach. A wide sand buffer at Seagate is necessary, in the corps' view, to bolster and protect the 37th Street groin from a storm that could attack the site from the side ("flank") and undermine the effectiveness of that groin.

The corps is joined in this effort by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. Funding (65 percent federal, 24.5 percent state and 10.5 percent city) was secured through the efforts of Congressman Jerrold B. Nadler.

The army's engineers are not new to the Brooklyn beaches. Ironically, some critics say, the work the corps is proposing is intended to fix problems that the corps caused in the first place. Coney Island was a corps project in the 1920's, and they addressed the Seagate peninsula again in the late 1980's and early 1990's.

Residents living on Gravesend Bay, the north side of the Seagate area, contend that sand drifting around the peninsula, perhaps the result of the lengthy 37th Street groin and other corps construction projects, is damaging their community. One resident spoke of sand drifting into Kaiser Park, covering pathways and benches. Another bayside resident spoke of sand drifting into people's homes. A third resident, stated, "we now have 300 feet of beach we did not have twenty years ago." These residents asked the corps to use this "excess" sand to replenish south side beaches. The corps estimates that bayside sand could account for 30,000 of the 190,000 cubic yards it needs.

The corps' Edward Wrocenski, stated that "T-Groins are the best chance for the sand to stay in place" on the oceanside. He indicated that T-Groins have worked in New Jersey and elsewhere. Some people attending the public meeting did not agree..

Sand moves naturally by long shore ocean currents and storms. The corps is engaged in many locales around the country, building groins and jetties, and mining and moving sand. These methods are expensive. Where it is necessary to both build and replenish, it is even more expensive. And some corps opponents question the wisdom of long term beach projects that primarily benefit private property owners.

Environmentalists also raise concerns about the impact of corps projects that dump large volumes of crushed stone onto sensitive underwater inter-tidal habitat. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service fears disruption of the foraging behavior of the species they protect.

Still, the corps and the state contend that the $450,000 study and the $9 million project "are not about a beach for Seagate". The agencies say the project is about preserving the groin that holds the sand that makes the Coney Island public ocean beaches possible while keeping sand out of the homes of residents on the bay side. Some observers wonder if T-Groins will work.

Peter B. Fleischer, currently writing a book on the New York City waterfront, was formerly a transportation and environment policy advisor to New York City Mayors David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani.

New York City's Big Planning Projects: Avoiding the Public?


Over the last year, city government and public agencies launched an unprecedented number of bold plans that could transform the face of New York City for decades to come. In the midst of the excitement and fascination with these plans in the local press, there is little recognition that most of these developments could bypass the process that was set up for public debate, discussion and decision making. Despite a more open environment at City Hall ushered in by the Bloomberg administration, some of the most important decisions about the future of the city are being made behind closed doors.

THE NEW PLANS

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has a new plan for lower Manhattan. Also planned downtown is the winning design by architect Daniel Libeskind for the World Trade Center site. There is the ambitious plan for the 2012 Olympics, which includes a new stadium on Manhattan's west side, an expanded Jacob Javits Convention Center, a 4,400-unit apartment complex in Hunters Point, Queens, and dozens of other projects in the five boroughs. The Olympics plan overlaps with the recently-announced plan for Midtown West, which would allow up to 40 million square feet of new office and residential space over the next 30 years and extend the #7 subway line from 42nd Street. All together these projects could cost upwards of $10 billion in public money.

THE PUBLIC APPROVAL PROCESS

The city has two procedures for approving major plans that are set out in the city charter. One is the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP). This process involves public hearings and votes by community boards (there are 59 in the city), borough presidents, the City Planning Commission and the City Council. The mayor plays a powerful role because he appoints the majority of the members of the City Planning Commission and has veto power over City Council actions.

The second procedure, also established in the city charter, is for approving plans. It calls for a review process similar to ULURP, and follows planning guidelines set by the Department of City Planning. Since authority for these plans is to be found in Section 197-a of the city charter, they are often called "197-a plans." All official city plans, whether initiated by city planning or community boards, are 197-a plans.

ULURP was set up in the mid-1970s to give neighborhoods a voice in decision making. Before that, the city's neighborhoods had no way of systematically taking part in decisions that would affect their futures. In the 1960s, many neighborhoods rebelled against official top-down urban renewal plans that wiped out whole blocks and displaced thousands of people. They successfully fought giant projects like the Lower Manhattan Expressway through grassroots organizing and protest. And disenfranchised African American neighborhoods rose up to demand community control of neighborhood schools. Under ULURP, neighborhoods now get to review and vote on most major land use changes, including urban renewal plans, zoning changes, and the acquisition and sale of city-owned land.

Responding to neighborhood demands for a greater role in planning, the charter was revised in 1989 to give explicit authority to community boards to introduce their own plans. Community boards were also promised professional planning assistance, a charter principle that has yet to be put into practice.

EVADING THE PUBLIC PROCESS

Officials have a treasure chest full of legal devices for evading ULURP and the 197-a planning process should they choose to do so. One of these devices is the independent authority set up under state law. Authorities like the Empire State Development Corporation, and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, for example, can override ULURP and local plans, and thereby ignore local zoning and development rules. The bi-state Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, which owns the World Trade Center site, has similar powers.

The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) is a subsidiary of the state's Empire State Development Corporation, and effectively operates outside local planning procedures. In the Midtown West and Olympics 2012 proposals, many of the major projects, including the stadium and transit expansion, could be accomplished through independent authorities. State government and the authorities, quite understandably, have never made a commitment to use ULURP or 197-a as instruments to gain local approval of their plans.

But neither has City Hall protested very much or demanded that planning follow the procedures set out in the city charter. Instead, the mayor's office seems to be satisfied by issuing its own plans and negotiating with the authorities behind closed doors. While the mayor has stated his desire to gain more local input in the planning of lower Manhattan, now controlled by the state-dominated Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the new input would apparently be tightly controlled by the mayor. Thus, instead of launching a 197-a plan for lower Manhattan that would have to involve broad participation, the mayor chose to cook up his own plan.

As Jennifer Steinhauer noted recently in The New York Times, Mayor Bloomberg's background as a successful corporate chief executive officer has led to a style in City Hall favoring "private talks and public silence." Even when the proposals may have laudable qualities, and some of them certainly do, many people wonder whether they respond just to the interests of the insiders and leave out those for whom access to government has always been an issue.

The public participation process can be loud and messy, and produce unexpected results. But so can negotiating in the mayor's smoke-free rooms. And isn't an open and transparent political process what distinguishes democracy from autocracy? When the Civic Alliance, a coalition of 85 civic and community groups, organized Listening to the City, a gathering that brought over 4,000 people to the Javits Convention Center in July of last year, the participants gave a giant thumbs-down to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation's proposals for Ground Zero. It is no wonder that the corporation, fearing another slap in the face by the public, turned down the Civic Alliance's proposal for a repeat performance to discuss the recent design competition. But why isn't the mayor proposing a 197-a planning process for lower Manhattan that would give all New Yorkers and interested parties a chance to contribute their ideas and energies to this strategic rebuilding effort?

There is another route used to evade ULURP and city planning. It is the Board of Standards and Appeals, a semi-administrative body that helps developers skirt zoning rules in a way that can transform entire neighborhoods without any recourse by the public. But that exercise in undermining democracy we will leave for a a future column.

Tom Angotti is Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College, City University of NY, editor of Planners Network Magazine, and a member of the Task Force on Community-based Planning.



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