Giuliani & Vallone: Never Met a Rent They Didn't Hike.

• Author: Cohen, Mitchel
• Position: Rudolph W. Giuliani, mayoral candidate Peter Vallone

New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani lives rent-free in Gracie Mansion, a beautiful dwelling (soaked in toxic pesticides) on Manhattan's luxurious Upper East Side. Yet he has repeatedly ordered the eviction and arrests of dozens of poor and working class folks who are squatting abandoned city-owned apartments downtown. The Mayor said: "They think they can live some place and not pay rent. That simply doesn't work. You have to pay rent."

Unlike the Mayor, more than five million New Yorkers actually do pay rent for their apartments. Around half of them live in units that are rent stabilized or rent controlled (and even these average $538/month in Brooklyn). [1] But an increasing number of people cannot afford New York's sky-rocketing rents; many, particularly women with dependent children, are driven to homelessness on New York's sidewalks and subway grates.

And now the Mayor wants to give $1.1 billion in corporate welfare to the NY Stock Exchange to build a new building, while thousands can't afford to pay their rents and many more go hungry in our fair city.

Back in 1994, Mayor Giuliani signed prolandlord vacancy de-control provisions into law which enabled landlords to hike rents through the roof once an apartment had been vacated, so long as it rented for more than $2,000 a month.

Deregulation, it was argued, would help the small landlord make ends meet. If anything, the opposite turned out to be true: It enabled the giant landlords to further consolidate their stranglehold on real estate in New York City, at the expense of tenants and small landlords. As of 1999, just 12% of landlords had come to own 71.2 % of the City's regulated apartments; a group of less than 3,000 landlords owns an average of 238 apartments each! [2]

Unlike the Mayor, who saw fit to raise his own salary--he now makes $190,000 a year--the real income for NYC households fell on average by 11% between 1990 and 1993, and it has gotten regressively worse since then. More than half of all NYC households report income low enough to qualify for Federal housing assistance. A quarter of them live beneath the official poverty line.

Unlike landlords, a majority of NYC renters spend way more than the federally advised maximum of 30% of their income on rent. For many working class and poor families, fully one half of their income goes to rent. In Brooklyn, where I live, the figure in a number of areas goes even higher, approaching 70%. (In contrast, Cuba has passed a law setting...