WestView

The Beneficiaries of Inequity

February 2010

By George Capsis

I had a call from a very well-spoken woman who wanted my address so she could send me a letter complaining about my reference to the “elderly” using the M8 bus. “Plenty of young people use it,” she asserted, and added that she uses it to go to work on 80th and First Ave.—and she was 86.

She then further established her credentials by telling me how many decades she has lived in the West Village, and that when she first moved into the nice rent-controlled apartment (which she still occupies) it had a rent of around $200, but now it was up over $600. And quickly added that the same apartment is now renting for around $2400— “I don’t talk to these new tenants.”

Yes, well, I can imagine a little tension between a young couple having to pay four times as much rent as our nice 86-year-old.

Then I found a criticism of rent control in Wikipedia that spells it out—“Rent control is the surest way to destroy a city’s housing stock”; and “Rent control allows some people to stay in artificially cheap apartments, forcing the people who would have rented them into other less desirable ones”—and I take “less desirable” to mean Brooklyn.

Sure, a just-graduating young couple wanting to live in the West Village, as we did 30 years ago, can do so—if they have been selected as an intern by a white-glove law firm or by Chase to sell derivatives.

But for those who are still finding themselves (and some of us take 50 years to do this) $2400 for a tiny one-bedroom is a joke.

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