Thursday, March 14, 2013

Gentrification is a Hungry Monster


Photo: Dave Sanders for The New York Times

The New York Times reports what many of us have observed for years:
  • Gentrification is proceeding at an alarming pace, and rents are skyrocketing in the city’s most populous borough.
  • The old geographic boundaries of “affordable” and “unaffordable” are disappearing. Once working class neighborhoods have been gentrified; some areas are now undergoing “super-gentrification” and pushing old fashioned speculators outward in pursuit of new territory.
  • It’s really hard to find an affordable rental apartment in this city.

Does this sound like a market in which landlords need another rent increase?

We need rent regulation because the real estate market will not provide the kind of stability we as a society desire. Persistent RGB rentincreases, along with vacancy bonuses, IAIs, MCIs and other loopholes in therent laws, have pushed many once-affordable apartments out of the regulation system. Tenants are looking to the RGB for relief.

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