discipline posted:all of new york is gentrified as heck. I mean look at harlem. bill clinton lives there.
Yes, i was going to say, you are way late to the process where you're moving, and the process supports nothing but gentrification. Rent stabilization laws are a good example of this. There are about a million rent stabilized apartments in the city & most buildings built before 1971 were stabilized at one point. If an apartment is stabilized, the renter has the right to renew the lease on the apartment when the old one ends. The rent can only increase by a certain percentage (7% for a one year lease i think?) with each renewal lease. If the lease isnt renewed, the landlord can increase the rent one time, by 20%, for whoever comes along & signs a vacancy lease. If the rent rises above $2500 for a unit it becomes destabilized ("permanently exempt") and the landlord can charge whatever.
stabilization is monitored by the Division of Housing and Community Renewal. the DHCR keeps a record of rent history as reported by landlords, and arbitrates disputes over the accuracy of that record. if a tenant requests the full rent history from the DHCR, discovers the landlord has been overcharging, can prove the dirty deed, and can get the DHCR to accept the claim, they can be awarded three times the total amount overcharged & have their rent reduced.
Edit, and I know nobody is ever going to read this edit because its on such an old post, but if you're here reading on this edit today congratations you get a candy: treble damages is serious compensation, someone overcharged just $250 a month for 3 years is entitled to $27,000. Landlords do occasionally overcharge on stabilized apartments when the illegal rate is still priced appropriately for the location, but you can't always rely on public ignorance of rent stabilization laws and the DHCR, and landlords who fall into the habit of overcharging on rent stabilized units can get hurt very expensively when they get caught. The guaranteed increases from renewal and vacancy leases make the patient landlord happy to wait until the actual rent outpaces the maximum rent to qualify for stabilization... but who wants to be patient when there's cash to get?! End of edit
Fortunately there is a way out for the landlord. An apartment is also destabilized if the landlord replaces 75% of the building's main components (the plumbing, flooring, theres a list somewhere). Of course they don't have to do this particularly well since anyway they'll only need to report to the DHCR that the building is now permanently exempt from stabilization because of significant construction. It would be up to a complainant to prove that this construction was inadequate, a hard task for a tenant who moved in years afterward.
There are different ways of getting away with this depending on the neighborhood. In poor neighborhoods that might be gentrified in five to ten years, landlords are simply neglectful, keeping turnover high, and leaving units vacant until the building can be cheaply and quickly gutted. They do the worst possible construction in these; the goal is to resell the now-exempt building at ten times the investment in ten years.
In neighborhoods that are settled by, ahem, recent college graduates, landlords have to be sneakier. They can't be outright neglectful, just incredibly recalcitrant. Whenever an apartment vacates, they gut it individually, so that the building can be declared exempt as soon as enough work has been done. When simply renting to 23-year-olds isnt enough, landlords have been known to create other nuisances to drive out tenants, usually unending construction. The efforts to destabilize apartments become more frantic as more potential profit is lost to the Dominican family paying $400 less a month than could be charged some artist's assistant.
Landlords assist gentrification by getting their buildings destabilized, so my thought is that rent stabilization doesnt work if landlords have a realistic hope of exemption.
Edited by swampman ()
karphead posted:how often are legislative measures brought up to move the balance back to the renter in NYC? seems like it's the top complaint you hear from people that live there so it'd be a no-brainer for some left-leaning politicians to make their pet project.
yall should come to the south it owns.
ggw posted:have yall ever lived in a shitty small town where no one is rich enough to gentrify anything other than the local all you can eat buffet after wednesday night church?
yall should come to the south it owns.
i grew up there and i prefer both the movement of capital accumulation and that of my digestive tract
discipline posted:lol if you think there is a lease involved in this arrangement
environmentalism? lol if composted
discipline posted:well I'm here. the radiator is dripping and the store across the street has nothing on their shelves but like beans in a can and then a weird assortment of white people food at the front, white people food being like organic corn chips and some herbal tea from yogi and that's about it. but he gave me a plastic spoon so I can eat my breakfast and a paper cup. I bought some yogurt, two bottles of water and a granola bar for $9.25. living the dream
there is a c-town at dekalb and taaffe
karphead posted:how often are legislative measures brought up to move the balance back to the renter in NYC? seems like it's the top complaint you hear from people that live there so it'd be a no-brainer for some left-leaning politicians to make their pet project.
in 2010, the state raised the minimum rent that disqualifies an apartment from being rent stabilized, from $2000 to $2500, extending the natural lives of existing rent stabilized apartments by 3 or 4 years.
in september, our comptroller john liu released a report on how much new york citiers pay in rent. here it is http://comptroller.nyc.gov/bureaus/opm/reports/2012/Rents-through-the-Roof.pdf sneak preview, 30% of us pay more than half our income in rent each month
discipline posted:well I'm here. the radiator is dripping and the store across the street has nothing on their shelves but like beans in a can and then a weird assortment of white people food at the front, white people food being like organic corn chips and some herbal tea from yogi and that's about it. but he gave me a plastic spoon so I can eat my breakfast and a paper cup. I bought some yogurt, two bottles of water and a granola bar for $9.25. living the dream
how many different kinds of beans are we talking about here?