Now, more than ever, New York needs to preserve its affordable housing. The losses of subsidized and regulated housing have severely limited housing options for New York's working families. The Real Rent Reform Campaign focuses on preserving over one million rent-regulated units and tens of thousands of apartments in the Mitchell-Lama and Project-Based Section 8 subsidy programs. Watch the video below of our efforts over the course of 2009 to push our package of rent reform legislation. Our primary platform issues include: Over 2.5 million New Yorkers in over 1 million apartments depend on rent-regulation to protect them from high rent increases, and from being evicted without cause. The entire system of rent-regulation in New York City is being undermined by 'vacancy decontrol', a provision in the current rent laws that allows landlords to take apartments permanently out of rent regulation when they become vacant. Landlords simply need to register a 'legal rent' of $2,000 to get a unit deregulated, even if the actual rent charged to the next tenant is less than $2,000. The potential for limitless rent increases, and minimal tenant rights, is encouraging landlords to use ever more vicious tactics to push long-term residents out of their apartments, and it is a primary reason why so many New Yorkers are unable to find affordable housing today. The future of affordable housing in this city depends on our ability to preserve rent regulation, and to do this we must repeal vacancy decontrol. We are now pushing the State Senate to pass bill S.2237-A which would repeal vacancy decontrol. New York City is unable to shape its own policy regarding rent land eviction laws, due to legislation dating back to 1971 known as the Urstadt Law. Since power rests in the State legislature in Albany, every year New York City landlord lobbyists give hundreds of thousands of dollars to the campaigns of State legislators outside of NYC who have no rent-regulated housing in their district, to get them to weaken rent laws affecting NYC renters. Returning "home rule" to New York City, by repealing the Urstadt law, is crucial to bringing fundamental reforms to rent-stabilization and rent-control laws. Mitchell-Lama and Project-Based Section-8 buildings received significant public subsidies to provide affordable housing to thousands of low and moderate income households. Developers of these projects can withdraw from these subsidy programs at the end of their contracts, in many cases bringing rents to market-rate levels overnight, which most tenants cannot afford. Tens of thousands of affordable housing units have already been lost, and tens of thousands more are at immediate risk. We are supporting legislation that would place all units in Mitchell Lama and Project Based Section 8 buildings into rent-stabilization upon exit from these subsidy programs, at the same rent levels that existed while buildings were in the programs. Doing this would remove a great deal of the incentive for developers to withdraw from these subsidy programs, and in cases where landlords still opt-out, it would preserve the affordability of these units. New York City and the surrounding counties have rent guidelines boards that set rent increases for rent stabilized tenants. These boards tend to award unjustly high rent increases and favor the landlord interests, based on the way these boards were designed in 1968. The Rent Board Reform Bill would improve the system in a number of ways, including ending the statutory vacancy bonus, requiring approval of NYC's RGB members by the NYC City Council rather than only the mayor, and ending the automatic rent-increases for rent-controlled tenants according to the Maximum Base Rent system. Our Full Platform of Legislation
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