The metro section of this morning's New York Times carries a dispatch from Park Slope, Brooklyn, on the battle between a landlord who wants to raise rents and a neighborhood group that wants to stop him.
To smartertimes.com, it seems as though the landlord is being entirely reasonable. The landlord is offering to pay moving expenses for his tenants who can't afford the rent increases, and he even set up one of the tenants in another apartment he owns that is rent-stabilized. The demand of the neighborhood group seems ridiculous: that the landlord "honor our racial and economic diversity" -- in effect, that the landlord subsidize the neighbors' desire to live in a racially and economically mixed neighborhood by forgoing the additional rent. If the neighborhood group feels so strongly about this principle, why doesn't it pay the landlord the difference between the market rent and what the tenants are currently paying? Why should the private landlord have to subsidize a tenant who earns only $19,000 a year but wants to live in an apartment whose market-rate rent is $1,000 a month? As the landlord is quoted as saying, he'd love to live on Park Avenue, but can't afford it, and you don't hear him whining. "This isn't Russia," the article quotes the landlord as saying.
The Times, however, makes clear where its sympathies lie in this fight. The landlord is described as "unrepentant" and "with sad, drooping eyes." The neighborhood group is described as "respected" and having "a proud record" and having "earnest young leaders." As if it weren't clear enough from these value-laden descriptions where the Times stands on this issue, the article -- a news story, not an editorial -- responds in its own voice to the landlord's remarks about Park Avenue and Russia by saying that the landlord "says these things as though they were self-evident truths. Yet in truth, little is self-evident about Park Slope's latest gentrification war."
Well, it seems pretty self-evident to us, if not to the Times. In the long run, market distortions of the kind this Times article advocates actually hurt cities and poor people. Landlords earning below-market rents end up letting their apartments deteriorate. There is little incentive for private investors to create or improve additional housing if they are not going to be allowed to charge a market rate for rent. Unused lots go vacant and are used as "community gardens" instead of as new apartment houses. Tenants are unlikely to make the transition to homeownership if they are getting such sweet deals on rent. The result is a kind of housing gridlock in which existing tenants are stuck in rental apartments that are cheap but in poor repair. Newcomers to the city, including immigrants who are probably more in need of cheap housing than long-term residents, end up paying exorbitant sums in rent for the few housing units that open up.
More Taxes: An editorial in today's Times calls for a tax increase on social security benefits. It's ridiculous that social security benefits are taxed at all, because the benefits are money that individual taxpayers pay into the system and then get back -- it would be like having to pay taxes on your tax refund. But for the Times to call for an increase in this tax at a moment when the federal government is projecting $3 trillion in surpluses, at a moment when the tax burden as a percentage of gross domestic product is the highest it has ever been in America during peacetime and at a moment when the New York Times Company itself is asking the city and state for a massive tax break for its new headquarters tower near Times Square -- well, that is just breathtaking.