For Bronx tenants, the housing affordability crisis is not a headline, it is daily life. It’s the mother who has to decide whether to pay rent or buy groceries, it’s the senior citizen on a fixed income wondering whether they can stay in the apartment they have lived in for decades, it’s the essential worker who kept this city running through a pandemic who now fears being priced out of the neighborhood they helped sustain.
The Rent Guidelines Board has a choice to make. It can either continue the pattern of rent increases that has deepened the housing affordability crisis, or it can stand with working-class New Yorkers and approve a one and two year rent freeze for
rent-stabilized tenants.
For Bronx tenants, the choice is clear: tenants deserve a rent freeze.
Year after year, tenants are told that they must absorb rent increases due to landlords’ rising costs, but tenants also face rising costs. Food prices continue to rise, utility bills and transportation costs have increased and healthcare expenses have also become a strain on our budgets.
Wages, however, have not kept the same pace. Sixty-two percent of New Yorkers cannot afford the true cost of living here. The reality is that many Bronx families have already reached their breaking point and under these circumstances, any rent increase is too much.
While rents increased twelve percent under the Adams administration, Bronx tenants continued to live with leaking ceilings, broken elevators, mold, pests, inadequate heat, and some of the most serious housing code violations in the City. Buildings in the Bronx account for nearly half of those in the City’s Alternative Enforcement Program, a program for buildings with the worst code violations.
These violations go unresolved for years. A recent Community Service Society study confirmed what tenants have long been saying, that rent increases do not improve housing conditions. But, if rent increases don’t lead to repairs, tenants have every right to ask: Where is our rent money really going?
The sad truth is that neglect is part of the landlords’ business model. The less of our rents they use to repair our homes, the more they can keep for themselves, and the more they can use to buy more buildings just to do the same thing over again. Landlords’ failures to perform basic maintenance, even as rents increased, has caused the very conditions they complain about today.
Another rent hike would be a reward for their neglect. Worse, gambling with our homes is also part of our landlords’ business model. When landlords say they can’t break even in the Bronx, it’s because they took on significant debt to purchase rent-stabilized buildings, betting they could deregulate apartments, raise rents and replace long term tenants.
Tenants fought to change the laws and closed the loopholes that enabled our displacement, and now those landlords can’t
repay their speculative loans. Another rent hike would equate to tenants bailing out landlords’ bad bets.
Some landlords cry that a rent freeze spells doom for the whole city, but multiple economists, the City’s Independent Budget Office, and even Moody’s Analytics have all refuted that claim.
Landlords should already know that if they demonstrate real need, the city and state offer multiple programs and millions of dollars to support them. And if landlords can no longer take care of our buildings, the Mayor’s new Housing Plan includes $2 Billion dollars to turn them over to tenants and communities who will.
Tenants have been organizing to take our city back. We have been organizing for a rent freeze at the Rent Guidelines Board for over a decade. Last year, we organized to collect 20,000 signatures from rent-stabilized tenants who said a rent freeze was the defining issue of the mayoral election; and turned it into a key issue in the Democratic primary.
Then, we organized to elect a Mayor who made our rent freeze his top campaign promise. This year, tenants have been
turning out in record numbers to the Rent Guidelines Board hearings to ensure we win a rent freeze. Tenants are the majority in NYC, and it’s time for our city government to put tenants’ needs first.
A rent freeze is not a handout nor is it a gift. It is an acknowledgement that tenants cannot continue to serve as an endless source of revenue for wealthy landlords while we struggle to survive. And it is the result of years of tenant organizing to make our city run for us. At a time of rising homelessness, growing inequality, and persistent housing insecurity, the choice is obvious.
Freeze the rent on one and two year leases. Keep families housed. Protect the Bronx.
Joanne Grell is a Bronx-based tenant Leader with CASA (Community Action for Safe Apartments) and a co-chair of the Rent Freeze campaign with the NYS Tenant Bloc/Housing Justice for All. Joanne also serves on Bronx Community Board 10, where she sits on the Housing & Zoning and Municipal Services Committees, helping to shape local policy. She is a rent-stabilized tenant for the past 24 years, living in the same Pelham Bay apartment where she raised her two children.
