Jefferson Siegel/New York Daily News The Rent Guidelines Board has to act on the facts, not politics. The city’s regulated renters are set to learn Monday night whether populist politics or the law and economics will decide how much more they’ll need to pay for housing. They’d love for the politics to prevail.
Mayor de Blasio planted the seed when, as a mayoral candidate, he called for a rent freeze as a remedy for his have-and-have-not tale of two cities. Tenants and a swollen chorus of elected officials, including Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, took up the chant for zero hikes.
More recently, de Blasio paid due respect to the Rent Guidelines Board obligation to consider how landlord costs have risen as the panel sets hikes for the city’s million-odd stabilized apartments. By that measure, a rent freeze would be virtually impossible.
“The Rent Guidelines Board’s job is to look at a lot of information and decide what makes sense first and foremost based on the actual facts, the actual numbers,” he said last week, perhaps under the good influence of his legal counsel.
De Blasio’s newfound consideration of dollars and cents is of a piece with his transformation in the controversy over closing Long Island College Hospital. There, as the State University of New York moved to close the money-losing LICH and sell the property for real estate development, de Blasio sued, insisting that the facility be replaced with a new full-service hospital.
Only problem: There’s no market for such a hospital. In the end, de Blasio helped delay the transaction at a cost of $ 130 million to SUNY — and wound up, essentially, with the originally proposed replacement project.
By initially calling for zero rent hikes and leading the LICH charge, de Blasio whipped up unreasonable expectations that happened to gain him crucial support in his run for City Hall. Now, though, the demands of governing appear to have taught him the lesson that wishing will not make it so.
Let’s hope.
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