Tenants who are out of work amid the COVID-19 crisis may have trouble paying their monthly rent, but simply canceling their payments, even just temporarily, doesn’t solve the problem. It just dumps it onto landlords.
Housing advocates don’t care. They’re pushing a statewide “rent strike” on May 1. Several officials want to suspend or even scrap rent entirely, maybe for a year. Already, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has banned evictions for 90 days, so tenants won’t suffer if they withhold rent during that time.
“Millions of us will be unable to pay the rent on May 1,” reads an Upstate-Downstate Housing Alliance petition. “Let’s not pay, together!” State Sen. Michael Gianaris demands rents be “canceled.”
Yet building owners have bills, too. Landlords need cash to pay their employees, vendors and creditors — maintenance workers, lenders, insurers, fuel suppliers, even city government itself, which relies heavily on their property-tax payments to fund its own budget.
Nor do many owners have piles of cash laying around to draw on. These are often small-time moms and pops who operate on thin margins. Industry data show landlords with 50 or fewer apartments own 60 percent of rent-stabilized units.
Many even act as their own supers — and are now personally sanitizing railings, door handles and other public surfaces to protect tenants.
Meanwhile, the Rent Guidelines Board just reported that net income for building owners actually fell 0.6 percent from 2017 to 2018, the first dip since 2003; costs spiked 5.8 percent. (The board’s staff recommends rent hikes of at least 2.5 percent this year for the city’s nearly 1 million rent-regulated apartments to offset higher operating costs.)
Even Mayor Bill de Blasio seems to get it. “A lot of smaller landlords” won’t “be able to keep their buildings going” without rental income, he notes, creating “a very bad situation for everyone.”
Many tenants will be cushioned by unemployment benefits and stimulus checks. Politicians who want to help them even more shouldn’t do so at the expense of another struggling group.
