[cynicalkane]

How many New Yorkers have you talked to?

Not everyone is happy paying several times the rent of their neighbors, just because they were there first.

We're also not really happy that a lot of the housing is slum-quality, since landlords generally want their tenants to move out and the law obliges them to make sure the guy paying $3000 and the guy paying $500 are equally miserable.

[boskonyc]

The building that I currently live in in Manhattan was taken out of rent regulation (stabilization) with my lease. It's a well managed elevator building from the 70s. I'm perfectly fine paying several times more than some of the building's remaining old timers whose rents only go up 2-3% per year. My rent actually only goes up 4-5% per year. The only difference between the regulated units and mine is what would happen if the building changed owners. If a new landlord came in and was less interested in long-term quality tenants, they could dramatically raise or double my rent every year, finding newer, richer, dumber tenants -- as long as the market would tolerate it (and with the national and international interest in new york, it would). The regulated units meanwhile would continue to only raise at 2-3% per year.

[busterarm]

I'm a rent-controlled tenant in a beautiful apartment building on West 55th Street. My rent is low, but not obscenely so.

I lived here through the hard times when the neighborhood was shitty and filled with derelicts, winos and prostitutes.

We all kept the building clean and nice. We lived in the building when _nobody wanted to live here_. We chased out the crooks who used to try to mug people in our elevator and kick open doors. The landlord made improvements to the building because the way the rent control law is designed, _they have to_ to get rent increases.

And we're still here and a great tenant and great neighbors.

Oh and of course the landlord has been trying all sorts of illegal means to get us (and the single-digit handful of other controlled tenants, 100+ unit building) out - and regularly gets verbally slapped around by a judge in housing court. It's a good thing we held on to hold on to _all of our records related to being in this apartment all the way back to 1970_...because we had to.

[busterarm]

$500 is laughably low for a rent controlled apartment in the neighborhoods where apartments are $3k.

Try doubling it. For starters.