Citizens Budget Committee and DNAinfo crunched the census numbers and found that in 2010, 22,642 of the city's 970,000 rent-stabilized apartments (approximately 2.3 percent) were occupied by households making more than $199,000. Of those, 2,300 apartments were occupied by people making more than $500,000, including a former Philip Morris executive, a polo-playing multimillionaire whose father is one of the country's biggest McDonald's franchisees, and other such cartoonishly rich people.
Predictably, anti-affordable housing lobbyists see this type of information as evidence that rent stabilization doesn't work and should be abolished, or, at the very least, that the restrictions of the luxury decontrol procedure should be loosened. Currently, in order for a landlord's luxury decontrol petition to be accepted, the landlord has to prove a tenant's annual income was more than $200,000 for two consecutive years and the allowable rent has to rise above $2,500. Pro-landlord groups like the (somewhat misleadingly named) Rent Stabilization Association of New York want to lower both numbers. Meanwhile, pro-affordable housing groups like Tenants and Neighbors would rather focus on tightening the restrictions on vacancy decontrol, where landlords are allowed to make upgrades to a rent-stabilized apartment, raise the rent, and use that to get the apartment deregulated. That process accounts for the majority of the city's apartment deregulations. The two sides are gearing up for a big battle in 2015, when the current rules for both luxury and vacancy decontrols are set to expire.
· Rent-Stabilized Apartments Are Being Occupied by Millionaires, Records Show [DNA]
· Lifestyles of the Rent Stabilized [Curbed]
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