Submitted by Forced out, Feb 20, 2007 19:43

For the Landlord who posted here - were the regulations a surprise to you after you bought the building? I hope not. If you knew of the regulations before your investment, then I hope you included their implications in your financial analysis of the opportunity. See where I'm going with this.... Anyway - everybody, please remember that luxury decontrol can also hit sitting tenents - not just vacant apartments. I live in a rent stabilized apartment with my wife. When the rent goes over $2,000, we will get tossed out if the number on the front page of our tax return is $175,000 or higher two years running. Well, let's do the math on that. Let's say we just pip $175K in gross income - this is front page, remember; no deductions for anything. So, we might take home about $130K after taxes. Now, we're self employed and pay for our own health insurance - a business deduction that doesn't count against that front page number. So, after health insurance for the year our take home looks like $114K. If our apartment gets deregulated, the rent is likely to be about $6,500/month. That's $78,000/year, or about 68% of our income. Call the movers!! We're leaving the city at that price - we certainly can't afford to buy a place. Now please recall that our rent goes up every two years - at a pace that exceeds inflation I promise you. Why shouldn't the luxury decontrol threshold go up every 2 years? Why shouldn't the income threshold go up every 2 years? These numbers haven't changed in more than a decade, while inflation has marched on and on. If you want New York to turn into an island of the wealthy - which means people whose spending is related to their assets, not their income, then go ahead and let rent regulations shrivel into irrelevance. If you want some diversity, I think we'll need to keep them.

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