By Philip Newman
Queens renters and a number of landlords jammed a room at Queens Borough Hall Thursday in a noisy finale to a series of hearings before a decision tenants hope will bring a rent freeze.
The Rent Guidelines Board is scheduled to announce Monday how much stabilized rents will rise in October for one- and two-year leases. The possibility of a rent freeze has been put on the table by the board.
It was stranding room only and the walls were lined with participants, including those displaying signs including “de Blasio Remember Zero.”
Many carried signs with only a giant 0.
The back wall was a sea of yellow shirts worn by members of Chhaya, an advocacy organization for immigrants, particularly Tibetans and other South Asians. Their signs were in English and Tibetan.
Radel Rahman, a senior community organizer, said Tibetans, as most immigrants, faced extreme problems when it came to finding an affordable place to live.
“For us, it is more like trying to get a rollback in rents, so serious is the problem,” Rahman said.
.As always, those at the hearing were overwhelmingly renters, but a number of real estate owners addressed the hearing.
“I know there is little sympathy for landlords in this room,” said Tony Subraj, who owns apartments in Jamaica.
“I come here as a modest-sized landlord and the buildings we mange were decrepit when we first purchased them with hundreds of violations each,” he said. “They now are significantly improved with zero or close to zero violations These improvements, however, happened only in digging into our own pockets and forgoing any real return on our investments as Rent Guidelines Board increases have continually lagged our increase in operating costs.”
Several landlords said that many renters are apt to forget that the owners pay high real estate taxes besides what they cited as ever rising costs of maintenance.
Much of what speakers said was lost if they used the word zero, which set off extended and near deafening shouts and screams.
Each speaker was limited to three minutes, but after only 70 minutes Rent Guidelines Board Chairman Rachel Godsil announced that so many speakers were waiting that the time limit would be cut to two minutes.
Many hopeful renters have expressed hope that the Rent Guidelines Board might freezes rents when it meets Monday evening.
In his election campaign, Mayor Bill de Blasio mentioned a rent freeze but has not returned to the subject since he took office. He later appointed five members to the board.
In May, the Rent Guidelines Board set the range it was considering for rent increases, which included zero to 3 percent for one-year leases. For two-year leases the board set limits from 0.5 percent to 4.5 percent.
There are some 144,000 rent-stabilized apartments in Queens.
