Queens Borough President Donovan Richards delivers remarks before the Rent Guidelines Board in Jamaica Monday.
Photo courtesy of BP’s office
The city’s Rent Guidelines Board (RGB) got an earful from Queens residents during a June 12 public hearing at the Jamaica Performing Arts Center.
Landlords and property owners were advised to steer clear of the hearing by the Rent Stabilization Association of New York which has a membership of more than 25,000 warning of recent “tenant activist aggression and violence” since the RGB proposed increases on rent-stabilized apartments across the five boroughs of up to 5% for one-year leases and 7% for two-year leases.
“Asking people to choose between rent and food and medicine is beyond unfair. It’s obscene and amoral and a driving force in the housing crisis today, and if I get squeezed anymore, I’ll be living out of a cardboard box on the street,” Flushing retiree Douglas Ostling said without a hint of malice. “I urge this board to put a moratorium on rent increases or at bare minimum, return them to pre-COVID levels in the range of one to 2%. Anything more will only reward unscrupulous landlords and poorly run properties and revert and convert them into veritable slot machines best regulated not by you, but by the State Gaming Commission like all the casinos.”
Queens Borough President Donovan Richards evoked the legendary housing activist Jimmy McMillan, who came up short in mayoral and gubernatorial campaigns before retiring to the state’s veterans nursing home in St. Albans.
“I’m here to say the rent is too damn high,” Richards said. “Queens and all of New York City are in the throes of a housing crisis unlike any we’ve experienced before. The number of families that are in homeless shelters and the overall cost of living from food prices to utility bills and transportation costs continue to rise rapidly. We must move with the urgency of now to keep families in their homes, keep the…
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