Landlord rights?

raw

escap wrote: Livetotravel, I don't know how the people I know who make over $300K and live in r.s. units get away with it. Apparently it is quite possible, so I'm guessing they're not the only ones, and I doubt that they lose sleep either. Speaking of losing sleep, though, the victims of rent control are not the landlords, who paid a discount when they bought the property in the first place--the victims are other New York tenants who are faced with the shortage in housing, and resultant steep prices, that all price caps inherently create.

As for your link, I read through the first 15-20 pages, and from what I can see it is not at all a scientific analysis of the effect of deregulation, but rather just a compilation of the opinions of a group of respondents. The fact that a surveyed group thinks more rent control would help the middle class by no means whatsoever constitutes evidence of such. For actual analysis of the effect of rent laws and their repeal (most notably in , see the reams of articles and research on the subject that are available at www.manhattan-institute.org and www.cato.org. Oh, yes, and I know that they are both biased, right-wing think tanks. For less blatantly biased views on the subject, do a Google search to see what the Economist, Paul Krugman, and Nicholas Kristof have all said on the subject.

Ok, dude, you win.

armchair_warrior

i hope one day they'll get rid of this system. people would pay less on one end and the people who are abusing it now would pay more.

escap

raw wrote:
Ok, dude, you win.

Sorry, it's been a few weeks since I've gone to my Web Ranters Anonymous meetings. I promise I'm done now, no matter what. :-#

armchair_warrior

haha escap, time will tell .

rose

raw wrote: [quote=dakotas way]OK. I don't understand something. Did these people move in without a lease? If they did, then it can't be rent stabilized, because there's no agreement between them and the landlord. Have they lived there since 1971 and never moved out?? If not, it doesn't sound like they have a right to stay.

I don't understand this part of the story myself. Have all of these people lived there since before 1971?

The apartment continues to be stabilized even if the original tenants move out. New tenants come in but they get to pay the stabilized rent.

It really is not a rational system, and it would make a lot more sense to provide housing vouchers to lower-income people. But the law is what it is and no one should feel guilty for living in a rent-stabilized apartment! This used to be the dream of every New Yorker. People who are outraged by this system should be lobbying for changes in the law rather than trying to make livetotravel feel guilty! The people who should feel guilty are the cheaters, like the guy I knew who got married and moved to the suburbs but kept his rent-controlled apartment as a pied-a-terre in the city until his landlord (after years of litigation) finally got him out.

Selfishly, I hope rent stabilization doesn't go away, because my mother-in-law lives in a rent-stabilized apartment in Queens and there is no way she could afford to live in the city otherwise. And no, the answer is not, "live somewhere else then." She's lived in the city her entire life, she can't drive, her whole medical and social support system is here, and it would be a huge disaster for her to lose her apartment.

livetotravel

I join escap in his pledge to end this discussion. You, armchair, are incorrigible and beyond redemption and surely will continue. We can all agree on one thing though - by all means go after those who are truly abusing the system - that should free up a couple of thousand apartments.

And escap, Kristoff's opinion doesn't count when he's writing a guest column for Krugman in his absence, right? :roll:

dakotas way

But I still don't get how someone can withhold rent and be allowed to legally stay there. How could the courts ever rule on their side? Because they're angry that the landlord asked them to leave? That's no basis for holding out.

rose

dakotas way wrote: But I still don't get how someone can withhold rent and be allowed to legally stay there. How could the courts ever rule on their side? Because they're angry that the landlord asked them to leave? That's no basis for holding out.

Landlord goes to housing court and tries to get an eviction, and then the tenant claims he's withholding rent because there's no hot water or whatever, and then the judge orders the landlord to fix the hot water, and gives the tenant a few months to pay the back rent. This process then repeats multiple times.

armchair_warrior

probably due to communistic leanings of the judges who have a bone to pick with landlords. and still wants to make a point of it.

escap

Damn it, I should never have sworn off further ranting on this subject... #-o So much to say....

Mind you, this temporary break only counts for this thread. I'll be back for the next round! :P

livetotravel

I think one of the problems is all the young turks who took and passed Econ 101 now believing they have answers to one of the most complex of our socio-economic challenges. Those who are ignorant of the history of the program in New York City cannot fully appreciate that complexity. And we're not talking about San Francisco, or Cambridge, or Santa Monica here, we're talking about NYC. Like Rose said, generations of people have grown up aspiring to the dream of having a rent stabilized apartment (there is effectively no rent control anymore in this city, so let's not rehash that). Certainly there are people who have taken unfair advantage of the program and should be weeded out and thrown out, but there are millions who are law abiding, hard working folks, mostly moderate to middle income, who find themselves with a golden egg and are really not in any position to buy in NYC or gamble on market rates to provide a much predicted equalizing effect. I mean when is the last time a developer did something nice for you? So I, along with millions more, hope and pray that stabilization laws remain in force. IAnd I believe that the NY State Legislature's action forcing apartments off the stabilization rolls once they hit $2000/month was a good move toward more egalitarian capitalism.

I know I just broke my pledge not to discuss this anymore - but I had to say what I said. That's it, no more, I promise.

armchair_warrior

escap wrote: Damn it, I should never have sworn off further ranting on this subject... #-o So much to say....

Mind you, this temporary break only counts for this thread. I'll be back for the next round! :P

ha i knew it!!!!


and livetotravel no surprise there.

germfree!

Livetotravel, this

"there are millions who are law abiding, hard working folks, mostly moderate to middle income, who find themselves with a golden egg and are really not in any position to buy in NYC "

Is perfectly reasonable, and fair play to those fortunate enough. But it doesn't jibe with your earlier comment that I took issue with:

Livetotravel wrote: I have plenty in investments and I earn plenty - my priorities are traveling a lot, dining well, and being able to provide for things my children and grand children may need.

That's all.

reader

Rent control and rent stabilization exist because they give politicians
a way to be "pro tenant" without costing government a penny.

garfunky

Whether its Guttenberg,Jersey City, Ft Lee, Hackensack, Englewood Bergefield , Fairlawn, Palisades Park, OR Windsor Terrace, OR Maspeth,
OR Woodside, OR Woodlawn, matters little.
one's life does not have revolve around trains. one could get a car.
the cost of a car plus the cost of a 350000 HOUSE is not MORE than the cost of a 500000 PS 1BR apt. unless youre buying a lamborghini.

" i dont think i fit any where but Brooklyn"
(sorry having copy paste issues )

stated perfectly.

If Park Slope is where one feels happiest and so, one CHOOSES to live in an expensive area, one cannot be overly bitchy about the cost of housing. The fact is that there ARE significantly more affordable housing options.
If i cant afford the neighborhood it aint the hoods fault.
I either have to look elsewhere or earn more.
Kinda like goin to a restaurant. I simply dont go to places I cant afford.
I dont complain that they should cut their prices in half for my benefit.

indeed one can pay nearly half of PS rents right around the corner in windsor terrace.
"oh gee , its soooooo far from the train so we cant POSSIBLY live there"(<<<---insert whining sound here)

i see people make this choice daily....
heck ive had people complain that PS apts are too far from a train,
one who told me that the walk from garfield / ppw to GAP was,
and i QUOTE " SOOOOO BRUTALLY LONG "

choice.

filmlover44

Sadly, the lack of affordable housing eventually leads to a lack of diversity in any neighborhood.

raw

armchair_warrior wrote: i hope one day they'll get rid of this system. people would pay less on one end and the people who are abusing it now would pay more.

Agreed.

raw

Rose wrote: [quote=dakotas way]But I still don't get how someone can withhold rent and be allowed to legally stay there. How could the courts ever rule on their side? Because they're angry that the landlord asked them to leave? That's no basis for holding out.

Landlord goes to housing court and tries to get an eviction, and then the tenant claims he's withholding rent because there's no hot water or whatever, and then the judge orders the landlord to fix the hot water, and gives the tenant a few months to pay the back rent. This process then repeats multiple times.

Rose, Thanks for the explanation. I am unfamiliar with the housing court system. I didn't realize you could engage in an arguement cycle within the court system.

How many years do you reckon a tenant could withhold rent within the court system? Forever? Or does the judge usually eventually decide in the favor of the landlord?

What do you think, escap or are you busy 12-stepping? (What do WRA members do, play video games?)

escap

Wait, am I being actually called out specifically? I think the fine print of my agreement allows me to answer direct questions.

Unfortunately, my answer is that I don't know. I'm not a lawyer and my only indirect experience is via conversations with landlords who told me that evicting tenants, even ones that don't pay, is extremely difficult and lengthy. However, I also remember reading recently that tenant laws had gradually shifted from being overwhelmingly pro-tenant to mostly pro-tenant, so apparently there's been some progress in reform.

BTW, no one should mistake me for being anti-tenant--I do not own my apartment, and my new place will run me over $3K a month. :shock: As I've said on many occasions, the thing that appalls me so much about rent control is that it achieves precisely the opposite result of its stated goal: it raises housing costs, reduces the amount of affordable housing, and squeezes the middle class. If it at least achieved the desired effect we could debate its merit, but there's no merit in a policy that hurts the people it's designed to help. :roll:

armchair_warrior

escap words are true words of wisdom .

veets

raw wrote: [quote=Rose][quote=dakotas way]But I still don't get how someone can withhold rent and be allowed to legally stay there. How could the courts ever rule on their side? Because they're angry that the landlord asked them to leave? That's no basis for holding out.

Landlord goes to housing court and tries to get an eviction, and then the tenant claims he's withholding rent because there's no hot water or whatever, and then the judge orders the landlord to fix the hot water, and gives the tenant a few months to pay the back rent. This process then repeats multiple times.

Rose, Thanks for the explanation. I am unfamiliar with the housing court system. I didn't realize you could engage in an arguement cycle within the court system.

How many years do you reckon a tenant could withhold rent within the court system? Forever? Or does the judge usually eventually decide in the favor of the landlord?

What do you think, escap or are you busy 12-stepping? (What do WRA members do, play video games?)




I must admit that I had a career in Housing Management and in that capacity often represented "the landlord" in court proceedings. I hope the totally pro tenant stance has changed.. but

It was not uncommon for a non paying tenant to claim there were repairs needed . Often these were very minor... the knob on the closet door is missing... The judge would "excuse" the tenant from paying the rent until another court date was set and the Landlord's obligation was to provide proof that the repair was done. Case postponed! And most times it took at least 3 weeks to get the case back in court and the general course was the tenant could "claim" the need for repairs 3 times before the argument started to wear thin with the judge.
AND what I am talking about are cases brought in on a disposses..non payment of rent.. where the Landlod's intent to collect rent and not to evict. Cases for eviction in Landlord tenant Court often got postponement after postponement with the argument... Judge I am looking for another apartment.. give me time... Judge... "O.K. 3 months!" And that often happened 3 times.
The number three was a magical number in housing court.

the ideas above were the "easy ones."

If the landlord could not bring the case to landlord tenant court to evict someone (and there are many times that happens for various legal reasons... then a Holdover case must to be brought to Supreme Court.. where the rules of threes seemed to get multiplied by three again! Holdover cases averaged a year or two before the tenant was ordered to leave and most times they "left" (vanished or whatever) still owing the Landlord much money for the time they had continued to live in the apartment.

I will not ramble on except to say what I learned from experience is that neither the landlord or the tenant is always "right" and either can manipulate the court system to their own benefit.

raw

Thanks for the information.

armchair_warrior

wow veets sounds like the courts are still very pro tenant. wow landlords are screwed.

caseopele

I'm one of those rent stabilized leeches. The apartment I'm living in now in CH is rent stabilized but I think the rent is reasonable for the area and for what I'm getting. The first apartment I had in PS was rent stabilized, my ex and I moved there in 1997, the rent was $650. The catch? The building was a shithole that had not been maintained and the landlady was an old Polish woman who was mentally unstable. She spoke English perfectly well unless she decided she didn't want to discuss something. She had slumlord Sonia Santos as the building manager and had her incompetent son doing repairs. Here are a few things I had to deal with:

Very little heat in the winter because the thermostat for the building was in her apartment next to her kitchen. She cooked alot so the heat from the kitchen would turn the heat in the building down. When asked to give an acceptable amount of heat she would either suddenly not understand English or complain that I was bankrupting her.

She went through the dumpster at La Bagel and would give us the bagels saying she got them from her son. If we threw them out she knew because she went through everyone's garbage.

She would frequently lock the first outside door (which she neglected to give each tenant a key to) when she went to sleep. I was woken up in the middle of the night many times to let people in that she had locked out.

Someone would lock their bike to the fence and she would yell at me because it happened to be on my side of the building. I told her repeatedly that it wasn't my bike, but she never listened and would still yell at me every time she saw me outside.

She had a room next to my apartment (on the first floor) that may have once been a store or something. She filled it with garbage and stuff she found walking the streets with her cart. I had to seal the door going to that room (it was already painted and locked shut) because it smelled and bugs were coming in.

A corner of our very old drop ceiling fell in right above our TV, of course it was our fault. It took forever to get her son to fix it.

The tiles on the bathroom floor were put directly on top of a wood floor when they built the apartments. As a result the tiles were coming up and the wood floor started rotting away underneath. There was a hole in front of the shower in the floor of rotting wet wood filled with bugs of some kind for months. She finally got her son in to do something about it and what did he do? He patched it with cement.

The toilet was not fixed to the floor in any way so water leaked around the base. The tiles all came up from around it and it leaked into the basement. This was, again, our fault.

The teeny tiny tiles in the shower were falling off in one huge section, it was never taken care of.

The hallway and basement lights were hooked up to our Con Ed account. I didn't know that and wondered why our bill was so high so I called Con Ed to check it out. They came and figured it out and told our landlady. She sent her son to yell at us about it, wanting to know why we didn't speak to them first. Like we had any idea what was going on. We were never reimbursed for paying for the building's electricity.

She refused to replace the ancient refrigerator (with a broken seal) for a year. It was so old that there was only one door and the freezer was inside behind another door. So much ice would build up in there that I would have to hack away at it with a screwdriver and hammer just to fit an ice cube tray in there. This was also our fault, we must have done something to the "perfectly good" fridge.

Her building manager, Sonia Santos, was trying to get the building from her when she died. She got her boyfriend the apartment across from us (she was married at the time). They would have screaming fights in the hallway and she would constantly harass us. She would wake us up at all hours of the night banging on his door and screaming for him to let her in.

She took me to court several times because I contacted HPD about her not registering the apartment. This was after all the crap above and I wanted to know how to get her to do repairs. The last time she took me to court she tried to sue me twice (at the same time) for $5000 each, the judge threw the case out.

When I was moving out, she changed the locks before I got all of my stuff out. I had to go to the precinct and have the police call her to let me back in to get the rest of my things. The poor cop who spoke to her was yelled at and at one point he had to hold the phone away from his ear. He had to remind her several times that what she was doing was illegal. She finally told him to call her lawyer and hung up on him, the cop was pretty shocked at her behavior. She let me back in but I couldn't take everything out. The day I found out she locked me out was the only day I could get a driver with a truck. I had to go back in and take only what I could personally carry.

I moved out and did not tell her where I was moving and the phone was in my ex-boyfriend's name. Unfortunately, I moved next door to the Drama Cafe which is owned by Sonia Santos. She saw me going into my building a few months later and told my old landlady. The old landlady tried to sue me for $25,000 for "damages" to the apartment. She ended up dying before the suit was filed with the court though.

I was so surprised when I moved to have a landlord who actually took care of the building. I had no idea how bad she was until I moved out and had a good landlord. Let me also say that I work 2 jobs to support myself and my pets. I have no savings and no "extra" money to save anyway. I don't buy clothes from any place fancier than Old Navy, no jewelry, new shoes (comfortable sneakers or boots) once a year for work, no real luxuries, I don't go out (mostly because I don't like to but also couldn't even if I wanted to). Haven't had a vacation in about 8 years and that was to Long Beach Island in NJ for 4 days. If I don't work, I don't get paid, I live month to month right now. This isn't by choice, it's just the life I ended up with. If they got rid of rent stabilization laws, I would either be homeless or forced to leave the city I've called home for 26 years and my family.

I completely agree that there are people who do not need a rent stabilized apartment, they can more than afford market rent. But there are more people like me, we're not evil or greedy. And the courts never helped me, neither did HPD. Aside from that last judge, they sided with my landlady.

veets

Caseopeople.. Truly sorry for the hell you went through with that Landlord.

escap

Caseopeople, I just wanted to thank you for providing an anecdote to illustrate what has also been demonstrated empirically many times over: rent stabilization leads to deadbeat landlords who underinvest in and undermaintain their property, and overall leads to a lower quality of housing stock in the city.

Also, you said that the rent you pay now is "reasonable" for your area, which logically means that even without regulation the price would be roughly similar, and thus you wouldn't be homeless. I recently looked at a stabilized apartment that had a legal limit above its market price, showing that indeed sometimes the regulation is not relevant. Besides, Clinton Hill is hardly the cheapest place to live in NY.

And of course, most importantly, if there was no rent stabilization, there would likely be a much larger and healthier supply of affordable housing for people just like you.

caseopele

escap, I've always thought if there was no rent regulation that landlords would just charge as much as they could. I feel that the only reason I'll be able to stay in my new place is because of rent stabilization. The reason is that if this area becomes more gentrified and people with more money move in then without rent stabilization my landlord would raise the rent to more than I could pay. I would constantly be forced to move to "less desirable" neighborhoods in order to stay in Brooklyn. That's just how I perceive it but I wonder if that's true. I'm interested to know what other people think though.

Also, some people have said stuff like, "Well, it's your choice to live in NY so suck it up. You could always move out of the city." That's not an option for me. My mother and stepdad live in Brooklyn, my only other family lives in Maine (my father, an aunt and uncle and 4 cousins). I'm very close to my mom and couldn't live far from her, she's a big part of my life. I've lived in NY since I was 6 years old, it's my home and I have never felt comfortable anywhere else.

I feel that if things continue the way they are that the only people that will be able to live here will be the very poor and the rich.

armchair_warrior

casepele. the market would equalized out, you would get alot of free up housing thats no longer in any form of rent stabilization.

renters wouldn't pay a certain amount and the owners would lower the amount. cause there would be enough housing around.

where my parents live, the area is rarely in any type of rent stabilization . rent is fairly cheap and generally the renters would get a break when they negotiate with the owners.

check out bensonhurst, gravesend, bath beach, fort hamilton and tons more areas in that area.

rents are cheap. owners haven't raise rents in long time!!

armchair_warrior

I'll probably get shot from my fellow brooklynites for this, if anyone wants easy commute and sane prices for rent and dont want to travel too far where i mention in brooklyn.

go find a place in astoria or close to, they are decent safe areas and rent prices are affordable.

quigley

armchair_warrior wrote: casepele. the market would equalized out, you would get alot of free up housing thats no longer in any form of rent stabilization.

renters wouldn't pay a certain amount and the owners would lower the amount. cause there would be enough housing around.

I feel like I'm being dense, because I still don't understand this. Why would the market equalize if there was no rent stabilization? I don't get why it would free up housing... there's still the same amount of people renting, right? They're just not paying stabalized prices, they're paying market prices. I don't get why it would lead to more available housing.

Would someone mind explaining again? I'd really love to understand this argument. Sorry if this is a stupid question.