Rent Control

I%26#39;m looking to move to New York in about a year - what is a rent-controlled apartment and how do you find one?

Any suggestions on neighborhoods, best prices, and where to go to find a listing of apartments for rent?

Thanks!!

Rent Control

Check out www.craigslist.org. Many of my friends have found their apartments that way.

Good luck in your search!

I may be moving back within the year, also. It%26#39;s an amazing place to live!

Rent Control

A Central Park carriage horse has a better chance of winning the Belmont Stakes than you have of getting a rent controlled apartment.

Rent control was one of those schemes put in place by NYC politicians pandering for votes a long time ago that basically forced landlords and real estate developers to set aside either a percentage or all of the apartments in a new (at that time) building for lower income residents in exchange for permits and/or zoning variances to build the building. By law, the rents tenants pay in a rent-controlled apartment can be increased by only a small percentage every few years, usually about 3 or 4% or so. The result is that the City determines how much landlords can increase rents and how often. Once the tenant and his or her descendants vacate the apartment, however, it becomes decontrolled and the landlord can charge whatever he chooses to rent it.

Rent control has produced situations in older buildings in which one long-time tenant might have a three-bedroom apartment and pay perhaps $850 per month while a newer tenant might be paying $2,500 for a studio in the same building. It has also produced situations, such as during the oil crisis of the %26#39;70%26#39;s, when landlord income from rents were not enough to cover oil, tax and other cost increases and resulted in hundreds of buildings being totally abandoned after landlords simply walked away from them. Welcome to the South Bronx. It is the reason why no privately-funded middle or even upper middle income housing has been built in New York City in years and only luxury buildings and condos are being built because that%26#39;s all developers can afford to build.

Even when a former rental building ';goes condo'; or goes ';co-op';, tenants on rent control, if they do not exercise the option to buy the apartment, get to remain under the rent controlled rents. Some unscrupulous landlords have done things like fail to give heat in the winter and actually have tenants beaten up by goon squads in order to drive them out of the building so they can get fair market value for the apartment.

Advocates of rent control claim it is the only way lower and middle income renters can afford to remain in New York City. They say that without it, New York City--especially Manhattan--would be a city only of the very rich and those in slums and housing projects.

I may be wrong on this but I believe New York City is the only major city in the U.S. that still maintains a rent control system. There are still enough tenants occupying these types of apartments to form a sizeable enough voting bloc to prevent politicians from changing this outdated system.

So unless you have a relative in New York living in a rent-controlled apartment willing to give it to you when they die, you%26#39;re pretty much out of luck.

Just as an aside, rent-controlled apartments are supposed to be de-controlled when the original tenant dies. Of course, when that happens, no child ever informs the landlord the parent died. That way they can take over the apartment under the parent%26#39;s name. As a result, many long-dead tenants are still listed as living there. Some of them would be about 125 years old by now.

Wellermdfan.

I wrote a rather lengthy explanation of rent control, but for some reason it never can up on your thread. Don%26#39;t know why. If you%26#39;re interested in seeing it, click on Trip Advisor Forums and find recent posts by me, Ruffian.

Ruffian---Your lengthy post came up. Trip Advisor seems to be having trouble with its page regarding posts. They seem to be slow to show up.

Technically, ';rent controlled'; apartments are the really old apartments (from the 1940s and 50s) that have specific restrictions on how much the rent can increase every year. In the 1970s, the NYC ';rent stabilization law'; was passed, which also restricted the amount of increase an apartment could be raised and provided protection for tenants from unscrupulous landlords. (NYC has always been a renter-friendly town, probably because of all the politicians knowing where their bread was buttered--in the votes of the numerous apartment dwellers.)

The best way to find a rent-controlled or rent-stabilized apartment is to discover a relative with the same last name as yours, who is already living in one of these places and who is ready to die. You can then just move in and keep paying the rent!

Stories abound of wealthy couples (or singles) living in magnificent, spacious apartments on Park Avenue, Madison Avenue, West End Avenue, etc. for literally hundreds of dollars a month! (In the legendary Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, for example, some of the older tenants are now living in apartments for $800 or $900 a month which are now (with the lifting of controls for apts. vacated) going for $2,000+!

Actually, there are two types of ';rent control'; in New York -- one type of rent regulation that is actually called Rent Control and a more common type that is called Rent Stabilization. Most, if not all, of the regulated apartments that come on the market are ';rent stabilized.'; Ads for such apartments will sometimes say ';rent stabilized'; or simply ';stab.';

Because of changes in the law that have destabilized many apartments, fewer and fewer come on the market (especially in Manhattan) and they are most often studios and perhaps one-bedrooms. They exist in all neighborhoods -- also (and perhaps more often) in the outer boroughs.

There are actually brokers who specialize in rent stabilized apartments and, given the dwindling supply of such apartments, you might want to consider trying to find one and paying his or her fee (typically at least 15% of the first year%26#39;s rent).

There are also books on this topic and you might want to look for one either the next time you%26#39;re in New York or in one of the online bookstores.

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