EDITORIAL

Evict these sky-high rents

Posted

You don’t have to hear it from us — it’s expensive to live in New York City. Zumper, a website that provides rental listings across the country, says a typical two-bedroom apartment in the city costs $3,400 a month — topped only by a similar-sized apartment in San Francisco.

To get an apartment like that, you’d need to make upward of $136,000 a year, or $65 a hour — nearly five times minimum wage.

Yet, it’s not much different in one-bedroom or even studio apartments.

The problem isn’t greedy landlords. Instead, it’s the age-old supply and demand. There is far more demand for apartments than there are apartments available, and because of that, the price people are willing to pay to get an apartment is much higher than it should be.

New York City has experienced housing shortages for decades — pretty much since the Great Depression.

Former city comptroller Scott Stringer found in 2018 that New York’s metropolitan population had grown by 500,000 people, yet housing expanded to accommodate just 1-in-5. Building new apartments is an uphill battle by itself with neighborhood resistance just about everywhere, but getting a developer to focus on true affordable housing rather than the far-more-lucrative market-rate housing is near impossible.

Something that has helped, at least a little, is what’s known as accessory dwelling units. More commonly known as “granny” apartments, this might be where a basement or attic or even a garage is converted into an apartment.

There are ways to create these ADUs legally, but many are not. That means they’re unregulated. Not inspected. Dangerous.

The de Blasio administration worked to create pathways of legalizing many of these ADUs — a policy the Adams administration has pledged to continue.

Even Gov. Kathy Hochul jumped on the train, only to retreat just as quickly with resistance from, well, the rest of the state outside of New York City.

We can’t give up. Hochul’s plan may have needed more consideration, but that doesn’t detract the need for more units to bring down rent prices.

It seems these days, housing in New York is a privilege. That’s wrong. It is — and always will be — a right.

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housing, ADUs, accessory dwelling units,

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