Photo of Lower Manhattan's skyline by Markusnl via Flickr
Over the past week, New York’s Financial District has become the center of a long-contentious debate on rent stabilization and its role in creating vibrant, vital communities in diverse urban areas. Whether it’s Harlem, downtown Los Angeles or Lower Manhattan, the endgame is the same: laying the foundation for family-centered stability and suburban-like comfort in a sprawling metropolis. Such a goal is necessary to the health of any city and its often-discrete neighborhoods, but the conversation too often drifts from constructive and inclusive city planning policies to partisan squabbling and media punditry.
And beginning with an October 4 Wall Street Journal article, “Interest Lags in a Rare Rent Break,” and continuing with this morning’s New York Post Article, “Why downtown’s cool to rent control,” the last week has made it clear that FiDi is not exempt from such counterproductive rhetoric. (The community engaged in this rhetoric by fervently rallying in animosity and approval, respectively, of the two articles.)
The Journal article by Laura Kusisto argued, incorrectly, that since September 11 FiDi has failed to become a traditional New York neighborhood with basic amenities and long-term residents, and that residents’ apathy toward rent stabilization is the cause. The Post article, on the other hand, written by longtime columnist Steve Cuozzo, suggests that everything is peachy in FiDi—that rent stabilization is a hindrance and that the neighborhood’s ascendant track has not a single spike out of place.
The truth, however, like with most partisan debates, lies somewhere in between.
One of the main issues is that both articles fell well short of capturing the true state of the community. They failed to do so because they relied upon blanket statements as a basis for their arguments and then arrived at equally generalized conclusions.
The Journal article, for example, begins with a false premise. “Changing thousands of Financial District apartments from market rate to rent stabilized,” reads the article’s lede sentence, “was supposed to be an important part of an effort to remake the fast-growing area into a family-centered neighborhood.”
First, it is factually inaccurate. In March 2011, State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver announced that the city as a whole loses 10,000 rent-stabilized units per year thanks to deregulation, including 1,700 in Gateway Plaza since 2009. Second, Kusisto’s implication is that family-centered neighborhoods rely upon rent stabilization to grow. This, of course, can be true. But it’s not absolute.
And in FiDi, as the Downtown Alliance made clear in a 2011 report, most of the area’s population is “affluent and well-educated.” FiDi, in fact, can and does live as a family-oriented community that is not dependent on low rents to counteract the high cost of child rearing.
That same report, titled The State of Lower Manhattan also debunked the Journal’s claim that most FiDi Residents are transient. In fact, two-thirds of residents as of 2009 had lived in the area for more than five years and had no plans to leave. Cuozzo accurately cites this statistic in his Post article.
But his article is by no means strong. His primary fault is disparaging rent-stabilization advocates as outdated “reactionaries” who don’t understand that the policy they champion is “the ruinous residue of World War II-era ‘emergency’ rent-control law, [which] to this day warps the city’s housing scene by keeping 1 million apartments of the market—sometimes for decades.”
Never mind that his statistic is dubiously unsubstantiated in the article—and in truth, there are barely more than 1 million rent-stabilized units total, according to a Community Board 1 report released in June. What is most obscene is his calling a policy that is meant as a social safety net—as a means of both protecting longtime residents with fixed incomes from rent increases and providing those with lower incomes an inroads to a safe, family-friendly neighborhood—a “ruinous residue.” Rent-stabilization policies have done immeasurable good for the city and could very well be a benefit to FiDi. Community Board 1 said as much in its June report. “The creation of affordable and rent-stabilized housing,” the study argued, “must continue in order to compete with the loss of units [caused by a series of deregulatory measures by the city] if CB1 is to remain a diverse and accessible community.”
Cuozzo’s assertion, citing statistics from the Downtown Alliance, that FiDi’s median and average household incomes ($143,000 and $188,000) suggest affluence, is also unreliable. Yes, most residents are affluent and do not need rent stabilization. But as anyone who has studied statistics can tell you, relying on averages and (the more reliable) medians as a justification for why social welfare policies are not welcomed is a dangerous practice.
And so there’s the problem. One article suggests that FiDi is a non-community, one without families or grocery stores or a necessary investment in rent stabilization. The other article flips the argument: FiDi does have families, it rightly says, it does have amenities and—yes, it has no need for rent stabilization. Two opposite views plagued with generalizations. So where lies the truth? As usual, somewhere in the middle.
FiDi is unequivocally a connected community. To suggest otherwise is either ignorant or blatantly disingenuous. And yes, many residents have no need for rent-stabilized units.
But some do need them. The Journal piece by Kusisto tells the story of 41-year-old Lisa Burdeshaw, who is planning to move her husband and child to the suburbs. They would consider staying if their apartment was rent stabilized. To argue that the community would not benefit from more rent-stabilized units—and to argue that residents, as the Post article condescendingly claims, “recognize greater value in a building priced by the law of supply and demand”—is to dismiss the social contract inherent in any tight-knit community.
If FiDi is indeed as community-oriented as their residents claim, then they should understand that rent-stabilization increases the diversity of an area. And that diversity is the foundation upon which all vibrant and healthy communities must build.
FiDi is healthy, but it is not bionic. It’s certainly on the right track, but it has work to do.