Democrats to State Senate: Pass 'Affordable' House Bills

State and city Democratic officials are calling on the Republican-controlled state Senate to pass a raft of bills approved in the Assembly that are intended to expand "affordable" housing and grant new protections to tenants.

"The shortage of affordable housing in New York City is at an acute crisis," the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, said at a press conference in City Hall yesterday. Housing costs have taken on a greater urgency, he said, as rising food and gas prices are putting more economic pressure on residents.

The legislative package includes nearly a dozen separate proposals that would make it more difficult for landlords to remove apartments from rent stabilization laws; increase civil penalties on landlords found to have harassed their tenants in order to vacate their apartment, and give city government the ability to pass its own rent regulation laws that go beyond regulations passed by the state government.

Critics of rent stabilization laws, which limit the percentage that landlords can increase rent each year, say price regulations interfere with the free market and thereby inflate rents on apartments citywide.

A City Council member sponsoring a resolution in support of the state legislation, Alan Gerson, said yesterday that laws geared toward expanding "affordable" housing are necessary in order to promote "diversity" and make sure the city's residents include a wide range of income levels.

"We are at a crossroads of self-definition," Mr. Gerson said yesterday, "If we are going to retain this diversity which makes our city great, we must maintain diversity of housing stock, which means we must retain affordable housing."