Clicking my way through the dial after discovering nothing on 13 or 21, I stumbled on a City Hall hearing about exempting builders from real estate tax for 10 or 25 years if they build 20 % affordable apartments.
The collective conclusion was the law that is up for renewal June 15 should be dropped. According to David Jones, CEO of Community Service, the program costs the city a billion in lost revenue, but killing 421-a would mean the Department of Housing could help 100,000 poor families—many more than the 33,000 it currently supplies with vouchers.
Jones is dead against the continuation of 421-a—which he explains was started back in 1971 when construction had collapsed. By 1980, building had rallied, but real estate lobbies convinced legislators to keep the generous laws. A good law for one decade can occasion inequity in the next.
Recently, I also learned of another arcane regulation evolving from the law that was originally designed to prevent rent gouging of returning GI s. Just as the 421-a law outgrew its original purpose and became a windfall profit machine for builders, rent control and rent stabilization has frozen an aging population in place and has prevented the next generation of young West Villagers from moving in.
It is this group of bright, self-competent college grads and future leaders that I think is being ignored. They make the city great, but the exploding rents are pushing them further out into Brooklyn and beyond—or maybe not even in New York at all.
Recently, Queens Assemblyman Andrew Hevesi offered that city homelessness is accelerating as never before—the numbers are the worst since the Great Depression. Of the present 60,000 city homeless, 25,000 are children, and the numbers are growing at an alarming 20% per year. He calls it a pending disaster.
Right now we spend $1 billion taxpayer dollars via the Department of Homeless Services and “millions of additional dollars by other city and Federal agencies” to house and feed the homeless.
This leads me to ask the question, who really needs to live in New York?
If you are in your 80’s and long for the sun, should you have to stay in the West Village because you have a $500 a month rent controlled apartment? What if you could have a better $500 apartment in Florida?
If we have to spend a billion in tax dollars to house and feed 60,000 or more homeless people a year, why feed and house them in incredibly expensive New York?
We could build and house retirees in Florida for far less, and build communities in up-state New York to house the homeless, with special schools for the 25,000 homeless children.
I propose creating satellite communities in other geographical areas—like Staten Island Park City or Winter Park Florida. We could offer rent-controlled, affordable rates in these satellite communities to draw away people who are staying here because they are stuck.
If the city taxed the jump in rental prices (not simply basing the tax on the real estate value but instead on the increased rental income) as apartments were decontrolled, it could cash in on the trillion dollar real estate boom. And thousands of rent-regulated apartments would become available to find new, lower market rates.
We do not need nor do we want higher and higher buildings, nor denser and denser concentrations of them. We need a city that can accept and provide affordable apartments to the young, bright and courageous.
