Testimony: Dale Goodson

The following testimony was submitted by Dale Goodson, a rent stabilized tenant and neighborhood activist who has lived in his apartment for over 20 years:

My name is Dale Goodson and I have lived in my rent stabilized apartment at the corner of Avenue A and 12th street in the East Village since 1991. I am now 60 and moved to New York in the mid-80's from Seattle to pursue my career as a performance artist and free-lance writer. My work has always had a topical and socially conscious bent and consequently was not always the most commercially viable. I was drawn to New York because of the vibrant mix of cultures, thriving artistic scene and an economically feasible housing environment. You didn't have to be rich to part of the fabric of the city. 

In 2000 an opportunity came up to work as a homeless outreach worker at the Port Authority Bus Terminal and that work became the focus of my life. Again, not the most financially lucrative job, but tremendously satisfying in so many other ways. Unfortunately 2008 took it's toll and the program I was working for was cut. In addition, in 2005 our building was sold and the new owners began a policy of turning vacated apartments into market rate housing for NYU students. Admittedly they have not used untoward or harassing tactics against long term tenants, but the culture of the building began to change immediately. Virtually all of the culturally diverse and senior tenants have moved out. We've are slowly turning into a college dorm. To date about a third of the 40 apartments in our building have gone market rate. Most others are still rent stabilized. 

I am now back to hunting up free-lance writing work and anything I else I can to stay afloat. The artistic scene and opportunities which once supported me have all but dried up. I have lived in NYC longer than any other place in my life. NYC is my home, but the relentless rent increases by the RGB are taking their toll. It never stops, even in the worst of economic times. I feel the vibrant cultural mix of New York is fast disappearing, giving way to a culture of the affluent. Given this trend I know of no neighborhood in the 5 boroughs I could afford to move to. Though my rent is low compared to market rate it is all that I can afford and each year becomes more and more precarious and unviable. My landlord on the other hand has an ever increasing number of market rate apartments to draw on for increased income as well as three street level businesses in the building and yet every year the RGB asks for more on his behalf. This is a destructive policy which not only brings hardship to those who can least afford it, but is fast turning New York City and the East Village in particular into a high income playground.

NY Observer: "The Return of Hooverville"

The New York Observer has published an important feature about the explosion of homelessness in New York City. More and more families are entering the shelter system every day. Many of them have been priced out of their apartments, and cannot find new affordable accommodations. This is one piece of the growing affordability crises in New York, which tenants described to the Board in testimony on April 25th (see samples here and here).

The RGB alone cannot solve homelessness, but they have the power stop to the rent increases that have put so many families on the street. The "Supplemental Rent Increases" the board has considered in recent years have disproportionately hurt very low income tenants; stopping this practice would be an important step in the right direction.

An excerpt from "The Return of Hooverville: The Deepening Crises of Family Homelessness":

Brooklyn is now the second most expensive place to live in America (after Manhattan), with townhouses that sell for $12 million and jars of pickles that sell for $9, but nearly half of its population can’t afford to live there. According to a recent study from the Center for an Urban Future, almost 40 percent of the borough’s population works in low-wage jobs, making less than $27,000 a year. At that salary, affordable rent (affordable is defined as costing no more than 30 percent of income) tops out at $675 a month. Minimum-wage workers can’t afford to pay more than $375 a month—a virtual impossibility.

A lot of people make do, of course. They triple up with relatives, live four to a room, work two jobs, display the scrappy ingenuity and hardscrabble bravado that we like to think of as quintessentially New York, until something goes wrong.

The huge increase in families seeking shelter is proof of how precarious the lives of New York’s working poor are.

Click here to read the full article.

Testimony: Gregory Lobo Jost, UNHP

At the apartment tenants' Invited Group Testimony before the RGB, University Neighborhood Housing Program Deputy Director Gregory Lobo Jost presented some extremely important information gathered and presented in UNHP's new report, Nowhere to Go: A Crises of Affordability in the Bronx. UNHP's testimony and report take a comprehensive look at the housing affordability crises in the Bronx, and ask how it is that in many neighborhoods, more than half the renters spend in excess of 50% of their income on rent. Nowhere to Go looks at numerous factors, including changes in the regional economy, immigration patterns, historic ebbs and flows of population, rates of eviction in Bronx housing court, and more. One thing is certain: with Bronx tenants suffering through outrages rent burdens, a high RGB rent increase will be a severe hardship for many tenants.

Analysis: Income and Affordability Study

On April 4^th, the Rent Guidelines Board staff released their 2013 Income and Affordability Study. This is one of the most important reports the board produces, as it looks closely at the factors determining affordability for tenants. The Income and Affordability study aims to assess economic conditions based on “relevant data from the current and projected cost of living indices” (Section 26-510b of the Rent Stabilization Law). The essential question it seeks to answer is: how are tenants doing in the current economy?

The answer is: not all that well. The report reads like a traditional Irish ballad, in which circumstances keep getting impossibly worse for the protagonist. Each page details another desperate hardship facing renters in this city.

We can- and will- get into the reports’ details, but it is important to look first at the overall picture the report paints. In that there is anything positive in the data, it is that the New York City economy, like the overall US economy, continues to grow. But this is growth without equity and, for many, growth without jobs. While the national unemployment rate continues to fall, joblessness rises relentlessly in New York City.

We have come to naturalize high rents in this city. To justify the high cost of living in New York, many people will casually remark that “things simply cost more here than the rest of the country.” While there is some truth to this, the data in the Income and Affordability Study shows that rents are truly out of proportion with other consumer costs in New York. From 1968 to 2012 (the period during which rent stabilization has been in effect), overall prices rose by 600%, and rents rose 677%. This is the inverse of the rest of the country, where rents rose at a slower pace than other consumer prices.

More than anything else, what the Income and Affordability study tells us is that housing costs have become unmoored from the overall economic conditions of renters in this city. As tenants struggle to keep apace, rents continue to rise ever higher.

As for the data, here is what we learned:

Unemployment amidst Growth:

• The New York City economy grew by 2.2%, compared to 2% last year. At the same time, however, unemployment rose to 9.2%.
• Even as national unemployment drops, joblessness in NYC rises.
• The gap between local and national unemployment is the largest in 9 years. Local unemployment has risen 4 times in the last 5 years.

Falling wages (except for landlords):

• Over the past 12 months, real (i.e. inflation adjusted) wages declined by 4.5%.
• Tenants in rent stabilized apartments earn, on average, $15,000 less than their market rate counterparts.
• Real estate is one of just three sectors where real wages actually rose last year!

Poverty in the City:

• Poverty rates continue to rise, hitting 20.9% citywide.
• Poverty rates are even higher for children, nearly 30% of whom are living in poverty.
• Poverty rates rose this year in every borough but Staten Island.
• Applications for welfare programs rose by 2.6%, while job placement among cash assistance recipients dropped by 2.8%.
• The top 20% of NYC residents makes more than 25 times the lowest 20%, making NYC one of the most unequal cities in the country.

Unaffordable Housing:

• The average rent stabilized tenant puts about 35% of their income towards the cost of housing.
• As discussed below in Wages and Rents pt. 1, most tenants are paying higher rents than they can afford, according to HUD standards.
• Nearly 1/3^rd (30.6%) of tenants are paying more than half of their income in rent.
• Rent burdens have grown for the past four years.

The Cost of Living:

• While overall consumer prices rose by 2%, rental costs rose on average by 2.4%.
• Electrical costs, paid largely by tenants, rose by 3.7%.

Homelessness and Evictions:

• As has been widely reported in the press, New York City is experiencing crises of homelessness.
• An average of 43,295 people stayed in city shelters each night, up a massive 14.6% from last year. This is about double the average in the 1990s.
• Last year, the number of households placed from shelters into permanent housing dropped precipitously following the end of the Advantage program. This year, the number continued to drop by another 7.5%.
• Housing court:
• While the number of housing court cases are down from last year- suggesting that more landlords are receiving their rent in full- the number of evictions rose by 4% to the highest level ever recorded in any I&A study.
• While not referenced in the Income and Affordability Study, we highly recommend taking a look at CASA and the Urban Justice Center’s recent report on evictions in Bronx Housing Court, entitled “Tipping the Scales”.

Taken together, the 2013 Income and Affordability Study presents a distressing picture of tenants caught between rising unemployment, falling wages, rising costs, and prevalent homelessness. If the Rent Guidelines Board is asking whether tenants can afford another rent increase, the answer is clear: no, we cannot.