The Issue: Whether rent regulation helps or hinders NYC residents in finding affordable apartments.
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The Post is dead wrong in its conclusions (“Rent and the Single Girl,” Editorial, March 7).
The vast number of elderly residents in rent-controlled or rent-stabilized apartments are not some Fifth Avenue heiresses, but retired men and women who worked all their lives and are now living on a limited and fixed income.
Furthermore, owners who set rents for their non-regulated tenants do so based almost entirely on what they can collect based on what the market will bear for a given apartment, not, as The Post suggests, based on the revenue from their other tenants.
Developers can already build as many non-regulated apartment buildings as they wish, so long as they do not accept any government tax abatements.
Deregulating existing apartment units will not lead to any savings for non-regulated tenants, but it will lead to serious hardship for hard-working middle-income tenants and their retired forebears.
Steven Sanders
President Emeritus
Stuyvesant Town/Peter
Cooper Village Tenants
Association
Manhattan
As a market-rate, female tenant living in Brooklyn, I would like nothing more than for there to be more rent-regulated apartments, not fewer.
Rent regulation is an important resource for the city and laid the foundation for economic and racial diversity. We need more of this, not less. In order to ensure that young, creative and non-profit workers come to New York, there need to be protected and affordable apartments.
Rent regulation isn’t the problem; it is the only system that can save NYC.
Katie Goldstein
Brooklyn