The Rent Guidelines Board
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- June
- 29
Every year, I get this little pang of nausea. The sickness strikes me when the Westchester County Rent Guidelines sets its annual rent increases for the apartment dwellers who live in the county’s 20 rent-stabilized communities.
That’s because I used to cover the rent board back in the early 80s. In those days, it was one of the worst beats ever conceived by a sadistic metro editor.
I had to cover every meeting, which was sheer torture because of the back-and-forth shouting that sometimes spilled into the hallway. I especially remember how a lawyer for a landlord’s group got in my face and I almost punched him out.After every shout fest, I had to write some kind of story, even if there wasn’t any real news to report. Watching the rent board in action, or non-action, was a nightmare. At its most interesting, it amounted to nothing better than a pack of self-serving lies and a never-ending tableau of greed.
A cynic would say that the bottom line rules everything, but with the rent board there is no question about it. It’s really the only government agency that behaves like a take-no-prisoners, bargaining pit.
The rent board has landlord and tenant representatives, as well as supposedly neutral public members. When I covered the board, all of the public members had inside connections and conflicts of interest that made it seem like they favored the landlords. Worse, some of them were serving with lapsed terms.
This mattered a lot because heating oil sky-rocketed in price at that time and as a result the building owners were requesting and getting double-digit increases. Last week, the board passed 3.5 percent rent increases on two-year leases.
I know it’s still a contentious enterprise, but the rent board can’t be anywhere nearly as bad as it once was. Ah, the good old days.
This entry was posted
on Friday, June 29th, 2007 at 5:41 pm by Phil Reisman.
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Phil Reisman is a veteran journalist and native of Westchester County. He began his career in 1977 as the head copy boy of a startup New York City newspaper that quickly went belly up. Reisman was not to blame for the newspaper's failure, or so he claims.
I lived in a Co-op, where I had to bring affadavits of suitability from 4 non-relatives to be considered for ownership, get sponsored in by 2 current owners, and endure a humiliating sit-down inquisition to be allowed to waste my money on the lousy rat hole. ( I think they were judging if I was weird enough to fit in).
Once I bought, then the endless fights to the death began, with the fossilized 80 year old eccentrics who lived there, one woman complaining that I peed too loud at night in my bathroom, another throwing garden dirt on my window, to complain my windows were dirty. (Don’t ask why—- I never found out).
Needless to say, I bailed out, and bought nice colonial house up near Indian Point, where $350,000 houses are still going for $850,000, instead of the $1,350,000 they cost down-county.
I just spent the weekend breaking my butt installing indoor-outdoor carpet around my pool, so my wife’s dogs don’t slip and break a nail or something, and if I’m not digging in dirt, I’m nailing something, or paying through the nose for some snotty gardener to cut something, but all-in-all it beats the Co-op battlezone hands down.
Here at least, my misery is a nice comfy private misery, not the communistic public mudsling I got dragged through in good old Eastchester.
Gee, I wonder why houses are so inexpensive in Buchanan. If you decide you want to sell I hear Entergy president Michael Kansler is looking for a new home. Seems Rye Brook is too dangerous nowadays. This way he can keep his eye on things and if anything does happen to the ol’ domed jalopies, he’ll be the first to know.
Artisan’s story about loud uringation reminds me of an apartment my wife and I lived in Rye…Not long after we moved in there was this terrible stench and we couldn’t figure out where it came from. The odor emanated from a clothes closet. Turned out an old lady, who lived alone next door, had died and her body had decomposed.
Goodnight…pleasant dreams….hmmmmm.