NY housing crisis: People vs. profits

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2 SOCIALIST ACTION AUGUST 1985 extended-it's an emergency that never subsides.

And every year when the rent laws come up for renewal a sharp ideological debate opens up between landlords and tenants. Rent Guidelines Board hearings turn into polarized, emotional, mass demonstrations, with hundreds-and sometimes thousands-of people on each side shouting bitter slogans at each other.

Not philanthropy The landlords extol the virtues of laissez-faire capitalism. Rent control, they argue, is bad for profits. If there's no profit to be made, no new housing will be built and the crisis will deepen.

"Housing is a business, not a philantropy," says one of their advocates. To restore their profitability, the landlords demand that they be allowed to charge whatever rents the market will bear.

Tenants, of course, look at the problem from a very different angle. Of the nearly two million renter-occupied apartments in New York City, 61 percent-well over a million-are subject to some form of rent regulation. If the rent stabilization laws were repealed, hundreds of thousands of people would be forced from their homes.

The New York Times pointed out on June 4 that all new construction in Manhattan in recent years is called "luxury, not because the apartments are really luxurious, but because they are priced "out of reach of 98 percent of the city's population."

Nonetheless, the landlords and realestate interests insist that to resolve the housing crisis "would require resuming a system of unfettered risk, of making a killing on a scarce commodity or suffering losses in a glut."

"But, writes the Times' commentator, "that runs counter to the dominant ideology in New York City."

Which is...? That "the profit motive is not appropriate in the provision of necessities."

A tenants' advocate is quoted as saying, "I wouldn't start with the premise that housing is something you can maximize your profit from."

Sounds like socialism

Sounds like a lot of socialism to me. But is it really "the dominant ideology in New York City?" According to a poll conducted by the Times, it is indeed. The survey found that "even those who might be thought least sympathetic to "Landlords extol the virtues of laissez-faire.

capitalism."

rent regulation say it is needed to keep housing affordable.

This socialistic attitude is so p :rvasive that the bourgeois politician: are afraid to buck it. Rent regulation, says the New York state assemblyman who chairs the Housing Committee, is 66 an untouchable issue."

Open the books!

Furthermore, the "dominant ideology" isn't limited to abstract socialist sentiments, but leads to further anticapitalist insights. When the landlords claimed—as always—that rent increases risen, the chairman of a tenants' coalition replied, "Until the [Rent Guidelines] board adopts a method of requiring landlords to open up their books and records-to get a true picture of actual landlord incomes, expenditures and profits-there is no way to know if rent increases are needed."

The demand to open the books of property owners to public inspection is a powerful challenge to bourgeois property rights. It places social rights-in this case everyone's right to a roof over their head—above individual landlords' right to business secrecy.

If the pollsters were to ask New Yorkers, "Are you a socialist?" probably not one in a hundred would say yes. Yet the dominant ideology on the housing question is manifestly pro-socialist and anticapitalist.

Permanent emergency?

The farce of renewing emergency legislation every year is a way of pretending that the housing shortage is a temporary aberration. The permanence of the emergency, however, shows that it is a built-in fact of life in the capitalist system.

Rent regulation is necessary to offer tenants at least some protection against landlord greed, but it doesn't go to the root of the problem. It treats the symptoms, not the disease. As long as the power of investment in new housing construction remains in the hands of private, profit-seeking capitalists, the quantity and quality of housing will continue to deteriorate.

Isn't that similar to what the landlords claim? Yes, but the solution is not to loosen restrictions on landlord profiteering; it is to take the profit away from the real-estate developers, too. Not backward to the free-market rent system of a bygone era, but forward to socialized planning of housing.

As the annual battles at the Rent Guidelines hearings escalate, New York's dominant ideology will no doubt be pressed toward another leap in socialist consciousness-this time beyond people-before-profits sentiments. The next level is an awareness that the profit system can't be patched up by rent laws but will have to be scrapped altogether.

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