The Frances Villar for Mayor (PSL) Campaign issued the following statement to the June 23 protest outside the Rent Guidelines Board. Ignoring the demands of the city’s tenants for rent freeze, the board voted for a 3-6% rent increase for rent-stabilized apartments in New York City.
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Villar is a mayoral candidate with first-hand experience in the struggle for housing rights. She helped organize the first tenants’ association in her Bronx apartment building when her neighbors grew more and more tired of their landlord’s lack of attention. As president of the building’s tenant’s association, she knows from experience that the only real answer to landlords’ dirty tricks is for tenants to get organized and start fighting back.
“It is time for working people to get organized and challenge the billionaires who run this city in business and in politics,” Villar stated. “My party’s campaign is designed to help build that movement.”
This year the New York Observer put together a list of the “Power 100” who run New York. Not surprisingly, billionaire real estate developers top the list.
In addition to the billionaire money men, there’s billionaire Mayor Mike Bloomberg, the “best-positioned person in government to nudge [real estate development] one way or another.” It’s only been one way though—in favor of the city’s super-rich
The City’s Planning Commission is headed by Amanda Burden of the ultra-rich Mortimer family. Her direct family includes inheritors of the Rockefeller oil fortune, and CEOs of TimeWarner and CBS. Yet every key development project goes through her office; she hands out the zoning ordinances and contracts to make her fat-cat friends rich.
New York used to be one of the most affordable cities in the country. It has turned into the opposite. Thirty-five years ago there were over a million rent controlled apartments. Now there are around 43,000. Rent stabilization has been whittled away, thanks to the landlords’ lobbying efforts in both major parties. Elderly tenants cannot keep up with rising rents, while working New Yorkers are spending an ever-greater share of their income trying to keep a roof over their families’ heads.
It is time to bring rent control back for all of New York’s poor and working people. Gentrification would not be possible if these basic protections still existed. Instead of bailing out the bankers and real estate developers who caused this crisis, the government should be bailing out those most affected, with an across-the-board rent reduction of 15-20 percent. That would at least return to us the money we’ve been forking over for the last few years.
- Rent control for all New Yorkers!
- No evictions and foreclosures!
- Roll back rents 15-20 percent!
- Put working people in charge of housing decisions!
- Billionaires, your time is up!
