NYC has a dwindling number of rent stabilised apartments where historically the rent has increased between 1 to 2 percent annually. These are very difficult to get and people usually stay for years. Cue 2022 where the landlord board insists they need to raise the rent by 9 percent or more to recoup their ‘losses’ from the pandemic. The rhetoric is ‘think about the mom and pop landlords who own a single ten unit building’.
FYI by ‘losses’ they don’t mean they lost money, they mean they did not make as much of a profit as they wanted.
Mean while our lovely mayor adams has insisted that everyone go back to the office.
So everyone has to be in the city within commuting distance of their jobs they can no longer work remotely AND they can’t afford rent. Perfect logic.
These people are ‘recouping losses’ from the tenants. You know, the same tenants who lost income during the pandemic, the same tenants being hammered by inflation, the same tenants whose wages have been the same for years.
When these tenants protest they are told they are the lucky ones because market rate apartment rents have increased on average by 33 percent. I swear as this pandemic ‘ends’ (when did it end btw?) the corporate and land owning class are running to tear the working class from limb to limb in hopes that they can sell our organs to ‘recoup their losses’.
Edit:
For those who don’t know, the majority of landlord in nyc are large landlords (more than 2 buildings). The average lower end of passive income from land lording is 60k a year. Also there were mortgage relief programs in place in ny:
https://medium.com/justfixnyc/examining-the-myth-of-the-mom-and-pop-landlord-6f9f252a09c