It’s famously hard to find an apartment in New York City. Andrew Cuomo has floated a plan to make it harder.
The disgraced ex-governor and current mayoral candidate has proposed banning middle-income tenants from rent-stabilized apartments. Specifically, under Cuomo’s proposal, prospective tenants wouldn’t be allowed to rent a rent-stabilized unit unless they could prove that the rent would eat up at least 30 percent of their household income. In a city where 41 percent of all apartments are rent-stabilized, this would take over one million apartments off the table for many tenants.
So why do this? Cuomo purports to believe that too many rich people are occupying rent-stabilized apartments. Specifically, he’s got a bee in his bonnet about Zohran Mamdani, who lives in a rent-stabilized $2,300 one-bedroom apartment in Astoria. Cuomo thinks Zohran, who earns a good living as a state legislator — is too rich for that unit.
Tenants may question whether Cuomo has their best interests at heart. After all, Cuomo, whose campaign is being bankrolled by landlords, has an awful record on tenant issues. As governor, he oversaw the loss of nearly one hundred thousand rent-stabilized units as predatory landlords removed them from the system, all while colluding with Republicans to keep the state senate in deep-blue New York in Republican hands for a decade.
If it were up to Cuomo, rent stabilization in the city would be on its way out the door. Thankfully, a tidal wave of progressive activism during Donald Trump’s first term brought Democrats to power in the state senate, and the governor was forced to sign a rent law reform package that stopped the bleeding. (He now says he regrets allowing it to become law.)
History aside, though, is Cuomo’s…
Auteur: Michael Kinnucan
