rent stabilization

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I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron

G4S, rent stabilization, women in the workforce

I have had enough psychoanalysis to know not to take such dreams literally, but it’s nonetheless amazing to me that when my unconscious mind searched for a symbol of what I would most hate to lose, it came up with my apartment. Around 1990, rumors began to spread that there was about to be a change in the law: Under certain circumstances, rent stabilization could be abolished, and landlords would be able to raise the rent to something known as fair market value. I refused to pay any attention. My neighbors were obsessed with what might happen; they suggested that our rents might be raised to eight or ten thousand dollars a month. I thought they were being unbelievably neurotic. Rent stabilization was an indelible part of New York life, like Gray’s Papaya. It would never be tampered with. I was willing to concede (well, not too willing) that under certain circumstances there might be some justice in the new law; I could understand that you could make a case (a weak case) that people like me had been getting away with a form of subsidized housing for years; I could see (dimly) that the landlords were entitled to something.

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The state legislature passed a luxury decontrol law stating that any tenant whose rent was more than $2,500 a month and who earned more than $250,000 a year would automatically be removed from rent stabilization. I couldn’t believe it. I was stunned. I could understand the new law applying to new tenants, but how on earth could it apply it to those of us who had lived in the building for years under the implicit bargain involved in rent stabilization? I had never even gotten a paint job from the building, I’d never even asked for one, and now the landlords were about to treat me as if I were living in a luxury apartment.

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Mucho grande cappuccinos. I lived in the Apthorp in a state of giddy delirium for about ten years. The tap water in the bathtub often ran brown, there was probably asbestos in the radiators, and the exterior of the building was encrusted with soot. Also, there were mice. Who cared? My rent slowly inched up—the rent-stabilization law gave landlords the right to raise the rent approximately 8 percent every two years—but the apartment was still a bargain. By this time the real estate boom had begun in New York, and the newspapers were full of shocking articles about escalating rents; there were one-room apartments in Manhattan renting for two thousand dollars a month.

Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places by Sharon Zukin

1960s counterculture, big-box store, blue-collar work, classic study, corporate social responsibility, crack epidemic, creative destruction, David Brooks, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, mass immigration, messenger bag, new economy, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Rent control, the more severe system, prohibits landlords from raising rents without making improvements, and all rent rises must be approved by the New York State Division of Housing and Community Renewal; tenants in rent-controlled apartments cannot be removed. Rent stabilization, begun in the late 1960s, subjects rent increases to the decisions of a citywide, publicly and privately appointed board representing landlords and tenants; in practice, a stabilized rent is subject to increase every year or every other year when the lease is renewed, and, unlike tenants in rent-controlled apartments, tenants in rent-stabilized units can be removed under certain circumstances. Both types of tenants have the right to pass on their apartment to their companion or a family member.

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By now, however, so many longtime tenants have died or moved away and landlords have been so aggressive at pushing other tenants out, that a lot of rents have been “decontrolled” or “destabilized.” Tenement buildings like this are a checkerboard of speculative opportunities. Only three of the sixteen apartments in this building are still rent-controlled, and six others are rent-stabilized; the remaining seven apartments’ rents have been deregulated. The difference is dramatic. Although the rent-controlled apartments all bring in less than two hundred dollars a month, rents on the destabilized units are ten times higher. No wonder the class world of the East Village has tilted toward gentrification.16 Shop owners insist, though, that the block still has an “authentic” East Village feel.

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There are stores that have been here for twenty years.” But since Eleanor found the East Village upscale enough to move her shop here in 2001, the block must have found a balancing point between class worlds on which it, like the Astor Cube, is tenuously perched. Ironically it is the longtime tenants, who live in the rent-controlled and rent-stabilized apartments, who create the sociability on which Eleanor thrives. “Another nice thing,” she says, “is the people who live here in this block. When I was renovating the store, they would come in and introduce themselves. Ever since, if I happen to be looking up as they pass, we say hello to each other.

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America by Alissa Quart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, antiwork, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, business intelligence, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Elon Musk, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, haute couture, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, late capitalism, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, new economy, nuclear winter, obamacare, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, post-work, precariat, price mechanism, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, school choice, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stop buying avocado toast, surplus humans, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

This is what the working poor have long done, of course, to stay afloat. One solution is to broaden rent stabilization, a system that permits a middle class to stay and flourish in expensive cities. I grew up in such a rent-controlled apartment—a book-lined prewar with a sunken living room and a roach problem—that cost far below market rate. Until this year, I lived in a similarly book-lined rent-stabilized unit that has glowing Ashcan School views of water towers to go along with the apartment’s silverfish. Rent stabilization and control go along with better-regulated real estate development overall, especially in desirable cities.

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Fischer, “Reversal of Fortune,” Boston Review, June 20, 2016, https://bostonreview.net/us/claude-fischer-reversal-fortune-urbanization-gentrification. urban scholar David “DJ” Madden: David Madden and Peter Marcuse, In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis (New York: Verso, 2016). Rent stabilization and control: Rent control started in New York City in 1969 when rents really began to jack up in postwar buildings; today one million apartments are covered by these guidelines, which protect tenants from big rent increases. Some think that rent stabilization helps create a fairer housing market, protecting it from gentrification. Others argue that the price cap on these dwellings reduces supply, thus raising prices around the stabilized or controlled units.

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My husband and I wound up with an unexpected $1,500 bill after her birth that we hustled to pay; most Americans owe even more, an average of around $5,000. Although we managed to avoid the financial perils that many of the people you will meet in this book experienced—partly because of the wonder of having a New York City rent-stabilized apartment—we did go through a few years of fiscal vertigo. We had been freelance writers for most of our careers, but by the time my daughter arrived this was no longer a stable line of work for the majority of its practitioners, including us. And now we had day-care costs and hospital bills.

How to Kill a City: The Real Story of Gentrification by Peter Moskowitz

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blue Bottle Coffee, British Empire, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, do well by doing good, drive until you qualify, East Village, Edward Glaeser, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land bank, late capitalism, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, private military company, profit motive, public intellectual, Quicken Loans, RAND corporation, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

The building was a mess—the hallway was literally falling to pieces, its front door wouldn’t lock—but the rent was cheap, $1,000 for two bedrooms. And every one of the six apartments in the building was rent-stabilized, meaning rent could only legally be raised by a few percentage points each year. Most buildings built before 1969 with six or more apartments are covered by rent stabilization, but that hasn’t stopped landlords from going into hundreds of apartment buildings in Bushwick and kicking everyone out. There’s not much data on how many people have been illegally removed from rent-stabilized buildings, but a walk around Bushwick suggests that the number is high: if you see an entire old building being gut-renovated in Brooklyn, you can bet the tenants did not leave without being illegally forced out.

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Their next-door neighbor, who happens to be my ex-boyfriend, was also told to leave his one-bedroom apartment. The building’s board gave him thirty days to get out. He’s now subletting around the city, trying to find a permanent place to live that’s within his budget. A few months later, fearing a similar fate, I tried to find out whether the apartment I was living in should be rent-stabilized. I filed a petition with the state, which starts a process that requires the state to inform the landlord of my petition. The landlord decided it was in his best interest not to renew my lease. I now rent the apartment month-to-month as I await a decision from the state, which could take years.

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Another week they noticed new security cameras in the building, pointing not at the hallway but directly at each tenant’s doorway. The residents started relaying all the communications to RBSCC. The steps the tenants took were relatively simple, but far beyond what most people do. The only reason landlords buy rent-stabilized buildings is because they know in most cases they can get the people out. Next time one of the new landlords called, Genetta was prepared. “I told them, ‘If you need anything from me, call my lawyer and talk to him,’” she said. “He was speechless.” Genetta and her neighbors are not activists.

Vanishing New York by Jeremiah Moss

activist lawyer, back-to-the-city movement, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, Broken windows theory, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, food desert, gentrification, global pandemic, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, plutocrats, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Skype, starchitect, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, young professional

Before I could stop them, they took pictures with their iPhones, opened my closet door, and poked around my bedroom. When I waved at them to get out, they told me, “Relax, dude, everything’s fine,” like I was a psychiatric patient in need of de-escalation. Everything was not fine. The new owners have been doing what they can to get rid of me and all the other “stabies,” that impolite term for rent-stabilized tenants. They gut-renovated one apartment, installing it with a pair of fashionable young women who pay $4,000 a month for 400 square feet. They alone are blessed with a washing machine and dryer, which they use daily, causing my apartment to vibrate like a bed in a trashy motel. I can’t say that I love my building.

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Writing in the Wall Street Journal, John Cale recalled composing with Lou Reed in a fifth-floor apartment, combining the sounds of “Erik Satie, John Cage, Phil Spector, Hank Williams and Bob Dylan” to create “a new form of rock—more about art than commerce.” The poet and downtown legend Taylor Mead, star of Andy Warhol’s hour-long silent film Taylor Mead’s Ass, lived on the street for thirty-four years, until he was displaced from his rent-stabilized apartment at age eighty-eight by real estate tycoon Ben “the Sledgehammer” Shaoul. Mead held out, enduring construction noise and poor conditions, for as long as he could, telling the Post in 2013 that Shaoul “doesn’t give a shit about who I am. It’s going to be hell.” Mead eventually surrendered his apartment, accepting a buyout and leaving New York with the hope of returning one day.

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One member of the club told Penley via the Post, “We’re going to fill his neighborhood whether he likes it or not. We’re coming with briefcases and BlackBerrys in hand to stake our claim.” At an “Outsiders” art show, in a Bowery restaurant supply shop about to become another upscale pizzeria, Penley stuck dollar bills to the window, each scrawled with slogans like “worthless” and “eat the rich.” To a rent-stabilized tenement building evicted and converted into a single-family mansion by real estate tycoon Alistair Economakis, the Slacktivists brought a guillotine and shouts of “Let them eat shit!” They marched on NYU dorms, the Christodora House, and the John Varvatos shop. And after each action, the Slacktivists would retire for drinks at Mars Bar.

City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco by Chester W. Hartman, Sarah Carnochan

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bay Area Rapid Transit, benefit corporation, big-box store, business climate, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, illegal immigration, John Markoff, Loma Prieta earthquake, manufacturing employment, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Peoples Temple, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, young professional

It placed the burden to challenge any increase above that figure on the tenant and stipulated that if the tenant did not make such a challenge within thirty days, he or she lost the right to appeal the increase; it also required tenants to appeal to a mayorally appointed (rather than elected) rent stabilization board. It exempted owner-occupied buildings with four units or fewer. Most significantly, it embodied vacancy decontrol, meaning that in between tenancies landlords were free to raise rents as high as they wanted. The supervisors’ move fulfilled its intended purpose. Whereas San Franciscans for Affordable Housing raised $54,000, the city’s real estate interests waged a $700,000 campaign decrying the evils of strict rent control (sure to produce the kind of building abandonment that would turn San Francisco into the South Bronx), and playing on the theme of “let’s give the Housing Crisis and Housing Movement / 343 new law a chance.”

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But the law the supervisors enacted was weak, and its passage had the intended effect of undercutting voter pressure to act decisively on the city’s housing crisis. The actual working of the city’s new rent control ordinance has proved to be of limited aid to the renters it was ostensibly designed to serve. Some egregious attempts to impose rent increases greater than 7 percent were foiled by appeal to the newly established Residential Rent Stabilization and Arbitration Board; but in most cases, the appeals process served only to somewhat lower excessive increases, not keep them within the 7 percent 344 / Chapter 13 limit. One major form of evasion was routine, unaudited pass-through of rent increases for alleged capital improvements.61 Relying on tenant complaints to trigger effective implementation of the law was of course a major weakness in the ordinance: The reality is that tenants—particularly lowerincome, minority, and recent immigrant tenants—often are not aware of their legal rights and not likely to use a bureaucratic mechanism they perceive as inaccessible or unresponsive.

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Led by a new organization, the Affordable Housing Alliance (AHA), it brought about a considerable tightening of the law. While vacancy control was not included, the major revision was to turn around responsibility for exceeding the 7 percent annual limit: Under the amended law, landlords had to seek permission from the rent stabilization board in order to exceed that figure, rather than requiring tenants to challenge an excessive rent increase. And the law was extended indefinitely, rather than having a short-term life. Mayor Feinstein reluctantly signed the bill. 348 / Chapter 13 The Affordable Housing Alliance also worked to develop organized tenant voting power as a lever on supervisorial candidates.

My Misspent Youth: Essays by Meghan Daum

haute couture, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, pneumatic tube, rent control, rent stabilization, Yogi Berra

After five years and eight different roommates in the 100th Street apartment, I was earning enough money to move to my own place and, more importantly, had garnered enough contacts with established Manhattanites to find myself a two-year sublet in a rent-stabilized apartment. The fact that I got this sublet through a connection from a Columbia professor has always struck me as justification enough for the money I spent to go to school; as we all know by now, the value of a rent-stabilized one-bedroom is equal to if not greater than that of a master’s degree or even the sale of a manuscript to a publisher. And though I still had not hit the literary jackpot by producing the best-seller that would pay off my loans and buy me some permanent housing, I still felt I’d come out ahead in the deal.

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For me, money has always, truly, been “only money,” a petty concern of the shallower classes, a fatuous substitute for more important things like fresh flowers and “meaningful conversations” in the living room. But the days when I can ignore the whole matter are growing further and further apart. My rent-stabilized sublet is about to expire, and I now must find somewhere else to live. I have friends getting rich off the stock market and buying million-dollar houses. I have other friends who are almost as bad off as I am and who compulsively volunteer for relief work in Third World countries as a way of forgetting that they can’t quite afford to live in the first world.

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing by Andrew Ross

8-hour work day, Airbnb, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, clean water, climate change refugee, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, do what you love, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, El Camino Real, emotional labour, financial innovation, fixed income, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, Hernando de Soto, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Housing First, housing justice, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, land bank, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Calthorpe, pill mill, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, starchitect, tech bro, the built environment, traffic fines, uber lyft, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, working poor

Many of Florida’s counties and municipalities enjoy home rule powers over zoning, taxation, housing ordinances, and other fiscal matters, so where you live matters a lot. These variations make it difficult to apply one-size-fits-all remedies to the problem of affordability. For example, the debate about rent control is red-hot among housing advocates in New York, California, and Oregon, each of which approved rent caps or rent stabilization laws in the past few years, but discussion of this topic is almost nonexistent in most parts of the country.13 In one of my conversations with Osceola’s housing specialist Susan Caswell, I asked her what rent control would look like in her neck of the woods. “That’s so foreign to me,” she said, eyes widening.

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The scope of the affordable housing shortage demands a government response far beyond the reflex action of just offering more sugar for developers to jump into the game. Simply building more housing units will not provide long-term security for low- and middle-income households without additional guarantees of rent stability or protections against eviction and displacement. Nor will a new commitment to public or social housing succeed unless it is accompanied by policies designed to lift incomes up from decades of wage stagnation and ensure inexpensive access to other public goods like education and healthcare. In response to the soaring costs of those social goods, “Medicare for All” and “College for All” have steadily risen to the top of mainstream progressive policy goals; both were prime-time talking points in the 2020 electoral race.

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, interchangeable parts, plutocrats, rent control, rent stabilization, Socratic dialogue, traveling salesman, yellow journalism, zero-coupon bond

Neither had a window. The place was like one of those little ant colonies you can buy, but it cost them $888 a month, rent stabilized. If it hadn’t been for the rent-stabilization law, it would have cost probably $1,500, which would be out of the question. And they had been happy to find it! My God, there were college graduates his age, thirty-two, all over New York who were dying to find an apartment like this, a 3½, with a view, in a town house, with high ceilings, rent stabilized, in the West Seventies! Truly pathetic, wasn’t it? They could barely afford it when they were both working and their combined salaries had been $56,000 a year, $41,000 after deductions.

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Rhoda’s mother had come through with her part of the plan, but it was already obvious that this au pair girl who was willing to sleep on a convertible couch in the living room in an ant colony on the West Side did not exist. Rhoda would not be able to go back to work. They were going to have to get by on his $25,000-after-taxes, and the yearly rent here in this dump, even with the help of rent stabilization, was $10,656. Well, at least these morbid considerations had restored his bathrobe to a decent shape. So he emerged from the bedroom. “Good morning, Glenda,” he said. “Oh, good morning, Mr. Kramer,” said the baby nurse. Very cool and British, this voice of hers. Kramer was convinced he really couldn’t care less about British accents or the Brits themselves.

The Future Won't Be Long by Jarett Kobek

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Donald Trump, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, Future Shock, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, means of production, Menlo Park, messenger bag, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, quantum entanglement, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban decay, wage slave, War on Poverty, working poor, young professional

Baby had no stomach for haggling, so I removed him from the matter, searching for apartments in the Village Voice classifieds until I uncovered a large space on 7th between Second and Cooper Square, diagonally across the street from McSorley’s. A two-bedroom third-floor walkup. The landlord, a Neapolitan named Stefano, informed me that the apartment was rent stabilized, but I hadn’t the slightest what that meant. $700 a month. There was no buzzer for the apartment, so guests would have to scream our names from the street. It was time to bid adieu to 31 Union Square West, to Sun-Yoon and Jae-Hwa, to the students that we’d encountered in the elevators, to the tenants who hated us merely for breathing, to our view of Union Square and the slow construction of the Zeckendorf Towers, to our old Bank of the Metropolis.

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The drugs goofed up my memory, sure, but the writing was way worse. The more that I vomited out words, the less that my own life maintained its texture, the less that I remembered of my daily existence. My brain couldn’t juggle two realities, couldn’t maintain its focus, so I plunged further into the world that paid the bills, into the world that kept me rent stabilized. Of that entire holiday season, only one thing stands out. A headline that ran in either the New York Post or Newsday: DRAG QUEEN LEFT MUMMY BEHIND. The queen in question, Dorian Corey, died in August. She was famous. You may remember her from the documentary Paris Is Burning. You may not.

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R. Delany

Jane Jacobs, Network effects, rent stabilization, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban renewal

But younger tenants cited the “privilege” of better-off tenants in more lavish properties, often paying far higher rents, to forgo such visits. Why shouldn’t the privilege of the better-off be a right—the right of privacy—for all? §1.2. For the last twenty-one years, I have lived in a five-floor walk-up, rent-stabilized apartment at the corner of Amsterdam and Eighty-second Street. In that time, the owner of the building has never been through my apartment door. Once, in 1992, he shouted threats of legal action against §B. During tight times the landlord’s visit facilitated a comparatively humane prioritizing of repairs—allowing tentant complaints to be looked at somewhat more holistically in terms of how much discomfort each involved.

Singular Intimacies: Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue by Danielle Ofri

if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, medical residency, placebo effect, rent stabilization, union organizing

Since neurology required at least one year of internal medicine training anyway, I figured I’d do a medicine internship and then either switch to neuro or stay on for the full three years of medicine. Staying at Bellevue was the simplest place to do that since the deans and the attendings already knew me and I could probably squeeze in some flexibility. Besides, I’d found a rent-stabilized apartment two blocks away and I would be breaking the cardinal rule of New York City real estate if I gave it up. I assumed that internship at Bellevue would be just a continuation of medical school, but it wasn’t exactly. For starters, all new interns had to be fingerprinted by a New York City police officer.

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson

carbon-based life, content marketing, Frank Gehry, gentrification, intentional community, lateral thinking, machine translation, Mars Rover, Maui Hawaii, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, pattern recognition, rent stabilization

Your drunken super, come to fix the toilet? Let me know, and if you think I should do anything about it. Are you coming back soon? I thought it was only a short one. Have you seen The World's Biggest Shit? No, don't tell me. Margot Cayce closes her eyes and sees her blue-floored cave, her $l,200-a-month rent-stabilized apartment on 111th, secured when her former roommate, the previous lease holder, had moved back to San Francisco. Home. Who's been there? Not the super, not without a bribe. How she hates this. How faint and peripheral somehow, these little things, yet how serious. A weight on her life, like trying to sleep under Damien's silver oven mitt.

Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age by Virginia Eubanks

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, call centre, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, desegregation, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, game design, global village, index card, informal economy, invisible hand, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, microcredit, new economy, post-industrial society, race to the bottom, rent control, rent stabilization, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social contagion, South of Market, San Francisco, tech worker, telemarketer, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban planning, web application, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Only the District of Columbia and a few cities in four states—California, Maryland, New York, and New Jersey—have rent control or stabilization laws. These laws limit how much and when rent can be raised and create a rent control board that, among other things, decides the maximum Conclusion 167 amount a landlord can charge for rental units and conditions under which a tenant can be evicted. Rent control and rent stabilization protect individuals and communities in times of rapid economic change, guarding long-time and low-income residents against displacement during speculative real estate booms. Most small cities, like Troy, lack rent control, and are thus especially vulnerable to rapid gentrification. Like rent control, community benefits agreements (CBAs) protect existing residents in times of volatile economic change.

Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, barriers to entry, basic income, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, job automation, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), low skilled workers, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, passive income, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, precariat, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telemarketer, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, very high income, white flight, working poor, Zipcar

With that reassurance, I told my husband where I was going to be and gave him strict instructions on how and when to check in—and what to do if I didn’t respond promptly. When I arrived at the apartment several minutes early, Yosef wasn’t home, but he soon rounded the corner with a bag of juice and cookies for our interview. Upstairs, he gave me a short tour of his apartment, noting that the two-bedroom rent-stabilized walk-up was his home and his first Airbnb listing—he was responsible for up to twenty-five Airbnb guests per evening. With plans to one day become a professional hotelier, he wasn’t letting his age or lack of degree deter him in the meantime. With assistance from his family, he rented two three-bedroom apartments in Manhattan’s Upper West Side neighborhood that he listed for thirty-night stints as quasi-hostels, with up to two people per bedroom.

The Stolen Year by Anya Kamenetz

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 2021 United States Capitol attack, Anthropocene, basic income, Black Lives Matter, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, East Village, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, food desert, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, helicopter parent, informal economy, inventory management, invisible hand, Kintsugi, labor-force participation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Minecraft, moral panic, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, rent stabilization, risk tolerance, school choice, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Chronic malnutrition, a lack of essential nutrients, is believed to interfere with brain development. Food insecurity, the preoccupation with having enough, is associated with high levels of parental stress, and therefore with mental health problems and behavior problems in children. Sheila lives in a rent-stabilized apartment in the East Village. In 2020 she had seventeen-year-old twins and a nineteen-year-old in special education. She worked in marketing in the travel industry and was laid off on April 2. The date sticks in her mind for two other reasons: “It was my thirtieth anniversary with the company.

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell

affirmative action, air freight, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, barriers to entry, big-box store, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, cross-subsidies, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, fixed income, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, late fees, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, payday loans, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent stabilization, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, Tyler Cowen, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now

Nevius, “When Rent Control Provides a Getaway for the Well-To-Do,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 16, 2012, p. A1. {40} Bay Area Economics, San Francisco Housing DataBook (Berkeley, CA: Bay Area Economics, 2002), p. 21. {41} Mike Schneider and Verena Dobnik, “Solo Living Drops in Manhattan, Rises Elsewhere,” Associated Press & Local Wire, September 6, 2011; Marc Santora, “Rent-Stabilized Apartments, Ever More Elusive,” New York Times, July 8, 2012, Real Estate Desk, p. 1. {42} William Tucker, The Excluded Americans: Homelessness and Housing Policies (Washington: Regnery Gateway, 1990), p. 275. {43} John Tierney, “The Rentocracy: At the Intersection of Supply and Demand,” New York Times Magazine, May 4, 1997, p. 40

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The Current Housing Problem,” Rent Control, edited by Robert Albon, pp. 5–6. {64} William Tucker, The Excluded Americans, pp. 268–277; Christine Haughney, “For Oscar-Winning Actress, Real-Life Role in Housing Court,” New York Times, August 3, 2011, p. A20. {65} William Tucker, The Excluded Americans, p. 268. {66} David Kocieniewski, “For Rangel, Four Rent-Stabilized Apartments,” New York Times, July 11, 2008, pp. A1, A13. {67} Sally C. Pipes, The Top Ten Myths of American Health Care: A Citizen’s Guide (San Francisco: Pacific Research Institute, 2008), p. 15. {68} Andrew Higgins, “Food Lines: Odd Borders Appear in Russia as Regions Face Poor Harvests,” Wall Street Journal, October 16, 1998, p.

The Rough Guide to New York City by Rough Guides

3D printing, Airbnb, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crack epidemic, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, greed is good, haute couture, haute cuisine, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, machine readable, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, paper trading, Ponzi scheme, post-work, pre–internet, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Scaled Composites, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, young professional

The enormous limestone Apthorp Apartments occupy an entire block from Broadway to West End Avenue, between 78th and 79th streets, and were built in 1908 by William Waldorf Astor. The ornate iron gates of the former carriage entrance lead into a central courtyard with a large fountain visible from Broadway, though you won’t be allowed to stroll in. The building, recently converted to condos from its former rent-stabilized self, is in a fair enough state now, though its fortunes have hiccuped over the years – it was used as the location for the crack factory in the 1991 movie New Jack City. The Upper West Side above 79th Street has seen a lot of changes in the last fifteen years as the forces of gentrification have surged northward.

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Remarkable decreases in crime and a revitalized economy helped spur the tourism industry to some of its best years ever. Giuliani emerged as a very proactive mayor and one quite happy to take credit for making the streets safer and city bureaucracy leaner. While he made enemies among progressives for gutting rent stabilization laws and providing massive tax breaks to corporations for moving to or remaining in the city (even as he reduced payments to the poor), Giuliani was handily re-elected to a second term in 1997. The city’s economy continued to grow, and a series of civic improvements, including the cleaning up of Times Square, the renovation of Grand Central Terminal and the influx of chain stores into Harlem, ensued.

The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead by David Callahan

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, business cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, East Village, eat what you kill, fixed income, forensic accounting, full employment, game design, greed is good, high batting average, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, job satisfaction, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old-boy network, PalmPilot, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent stabilization, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

For example, a reporter at Time magazine with seven years experience can expect to make roughly $75,000, while a reporter who's been at the Wall Street Journal for four years is probably pulling down around $55,000. This kind of money doesn't go very far in New York City. I know one journalist who moved to New York to take a plum job in television news, only to find that she couldn't afford an apartment on her salary. Lucky for her, she managed to bribe a building superintendent to get a rent-stabilized place. Reporters at other top publications like the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe and the San Francisco Chronicle are paid well compared to reporters working for smaller papers, who have a median salary of $40,000 a year. Yet all of the big cities have become a lot less affordable over the past decade.30 At the same time, many more young journalists are starting their careers with large loads of student debt incurred by master's programs in journalism—an expensive credentialing process that's become more common as competition has increased for the better jobs in journalism.

The Streets Were Paved With Gold by Ken Auletta

benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, business logic, clean water, collective bargaining, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, social contagion, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working-age population

If rich men like Nat Sherman were not in rent-controlled apartments, perhaps more upwardly mobile black families would live on Central Park West rather than move to Scarsdale. In 1975, 1.7 million of the city’s 2.1 million rental units were subjected to some form of rent regulation (either rent control or what is called rent stabilization). If there were a means test and those in controlled apartments paid a fair rent, the Temporary Commission on City Finances concluded after long study, city real-estate tax coffers would be enriched by $100 million per year. The federal General Accounting Office has said the figure would be twice that.

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar

The next fall, she happily matriculated into the school of her dreams. More than five years later, the dream has curdled. The economy crashed before Nandini even finished high school, and its tepid recovery has done little to improve her prospects. After finishing her film degree at NYU, Nandini and a roommate moved uptown to a rent-stabilized, fourth-floor walkup. Despite a fine résumé that includes a number of internships in her field of interest, she’s been unable to find any work. If not for her relatively favorable lease arrangement, she’d have difficulty surviving at all in New York and might be forced to make the lonely trek back to Texas.

Endless Money: The Moral Hazards of Socialism by William Baker, Addison Wiggin

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, asset allocation, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , book value, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, lost cosmonauts, low interest rates, McMansion, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, naked short selling, negative equity, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, reserve currency, risk free rate, riskless arbitrage, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, time value of money, too big to fail, Two Sigma, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra, young professional

It is reminiscent of other dysfunctional markets, such as the New York City housing market, where rent controls created artificial shortages, discouraged investment, repair, and rehabilitation, and led to oddities such as millionaires over the age of 50 living for decades in subsidized one-bedroom apartments while 20-somethings and young families were priced out of the market or paid well over 50 percent of their income for rent. By linking mortgage rates implicitly 220 ENDLESS MONEY to income brackets, the GSEs now supplement the progressive tax rate mechanism of the IRS. Like rent stabilization in New York City, it separates homeowners as much by geography as it does income, because the cost of living on the coasts and in different cites varies considerably. Unprecedented government intervention has occurred in response to the credit meltdown. In 2008 the government mortgage agencies were essentially nationalized, and through the TARP program, nearly $1 trillion was made available to recapitalize commercial banks.

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gigafactory, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, NSO Group, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, private spaceflight, quantitative hedge fund, remote working, rent stabilization, RFID, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, two-pizza team, Uber for X, union organizing, warehouse robotics, WeWork

Those leaders were also at fault; they assembled the opposition atop the falsehood that Amazon was getting an indecorous $2.5 billion handout, rather than a rebate on the sizable tax contributions it would make over the course of two decades. They also played on innate fears that the character of a cherished community and its surrounding neighborhoods would change. Yet much of Long Island City had gentrified years ago, and most of the lower-income housing in the area and surrounding neighborhoods was either rent-stabilized or belonged to large public housing complexes whose residents were protected from rising rents. And the alternative to rising home prices and an increased cost of living is rarely stasis; usually, it’s falling home prices, a lower cost of living, and hopelessness. By rejecting Amazon, an outer borough undergoing its own dramatic transformation was robbed of an economic injection that may have tangentially benefited its poorer residents.

The Mad Man: Or, the Mysteries of Manhattan by Samuel R. Delany

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, East Village, gentrification, index card, Pepto Bismol, place-making, publish or perish, rent stabilization, sexual politics

“This is a stupid idea, Phel—” “After you suck Lewey’s dick, ask him to speak to his cousin. Or at least to have Angel put in a good word with Jimmy.” “Phel, I—” But I got down on my knees and sucked off two very friendly sanitation workers. Two weeks later (after a bottle of Myers’s as my thank-you present to Jimmy), I moved into the top-floor rent-stabilized apartment. Like Pheldon said, this is New York. Living downstairs from me in Hasler’s old apartment was a small butterball of a woman named Hilda Conkling, who at first I thought was just too young to have a teenage daughter—very shy, very serious, the week I moved in the daughter had purple hair.

The Rough Guide to New York City by Martin Dunford

Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Sedaris, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, market bubble, Michael Milken, Multics, Norman Mailer, paper trading, post-work, rent stabilization, retail therapy, Saturday Night Live, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

The city’s reputation flourished, with remarkable decreases in crime and a revitalized economy that helped spur the tourism industry to some of its best years ever. Giuliani emerged as a very proactive mayor, and one quite happy to take credit for reducing crime – making the city streets and its subways safe – and the bloated city bureaucracy. While he made enemies among progressives for gutting rent stabilization laws and providing massive tax-breaks to corporations for moving to or remaining in the city (even as he reduced payments to the poor), Giuliani was handily re-elected to a second term in 1997. The city’s economy continued to grow, and a series of civic improvements, including the cleaning up of Times Square, the renovation of Grand Central Terminal, and the influx of chain stores into Harlem, ensued.