Henry J. Stern
May 1, 2007

PREFACE:  This is really two articles, a reminiscence of life in Inwood and some thoughts about rent control and its effects.  They can be read separately, or together if they hold your interest.
The housing discussion is not a brief for owners or tenants.  It  simply reports how the law impacted one family many years ago.  It does not recommend support or opposition for any legislation..


Today, the first of May, was a beautiful day.  We hope that the intense rains of the weekend have run their course, and that this month will be brighter and sunnier than April.  Whether due to climate change, el nino, sunspots or the ordinary vagaries of fast-moving clouds,  weather has appeared less predictable than it was years ago.
 
I remember when I was a little boy, the six-block walk to school (PS 152, Manhattan) was the most uncomfortable thing I did all day.  During the winter, the early morning temperature was often 8 or 9 degrees, with snow piled up on the curbs of upper Manhattan until the next snowfall.  It did not help that I often lost my gloves.  But that is another issue.

The streets and curbs were lined with more than snow.  The mounds of refrozen slush and week-old snowfall were marked with large yellow stains, and smaller piles signifying the necessary activities of dogs of various sizes.  This was long before the Leichter-Lehner law of 1978 required dog owners to pick up after their creatures.  Our neighborhood, Inwood,  was north of Washington Heights and south of Marble Hill..  Dyckman Street crossed upper Manhattan from the Harlem to the Hudson River about where 200th Street would have been if those streets had been numbered .  In Inwood, dogs were just dogs and breeds were generally mixed, in what seemed like random combinations dictated by local conditions and eavents.  Local dogs generally were not registered with the American Kennel Club.  In fact, it was not until the arrival of Boomer in 1991 that we learned that the ancestry of dogs was more thoroughly recorded than the parentage of people, with the possible exception of Mormons..
 
We thought of ourselves as middle middle class, although by today's definition of poverty as a growth industry we would ly be considered upper lower or lower middle.  If the poverty establishment were drawing up standards at that time, we would probably qualify as eligible for whatever largesse they had to offer.   Our choice would have been food stamps, if they existed.  Ration stamps were good, too, but you had to pay for the food.

However, we children never knew that we could be considered near-poor,  There was always food on the table, clothes to wear, a roof over our heads, and two parents in the house, although there were a few missing fathers on the block.  One of them, a boss stevedore on the West Side piers, was shot dead early one morning in 1948 in front of his house, which was next door to ours. For a long time, you could see where the bullets that missed him had penetrated the basement window guards.  That crime was not considered as making the block unsafe since it was not random violence or a robbery, but a specific killing motivated by a particular grievance; nothing personal, strictly business.  Forty detectives were assigned to the case, and witnesses to the slaying were questioned, but the murder remains unsolved.  
 
The ubiquitous piles of snow and dirt were further begrimed by the soot and ashes that came from the coal which heated the apartment houses on the block.  We saw the coal truck when it came to make a delivery.  It said anthracite, but we weren’t sure, it could have been bituminous. Coal chunks come in different sizes:.  chestnut, pea, buckwheat and rice.  I recollect that the coal that could have been  used was pea coal, although the pieces of coal looked larger than peas. This was, however, a long time ago.

The building  later converted to oil heat, which did not leave garbage cans full of ashes.  I remember the rival commercials on the radio, telling us that oil seeps and stains, or that natural gas explodes.   When it came time to deliver coal, , the front end of the back of the truck lifted up like a dumptruck, and the coal rolled out of the rear of the truck on a slide, which traveled through the open basement windows into the cellar.  It was the super’s job to shove the coal into the furnace as needed as required to keep the building warm and to heat the hot water for kitchens and bathrooms.
 
There were occasional differences of opinion on chilly days as to whether or not more coal was needed.  In general, the tenants wanted to be warmer and the landlord wanted to use less coal, so a truckload would last longer.  The tenants would express their sentiments by banging repeatedly on the steampipes, which went up through the entire building to the fifth floor. They would hit the steampipes with pans and shout, "Heat, heat.  Send up some heat."  One thing we kids learned early on was not to touch the steampipe. The penalty was instant, and painful..

Another amenity of our once-proud building was the dumbwaiter, which was a feature in the kitchen of each apartment. ou  The dumbwaiter was a square vertical open space, like an elevator shaft, only smaller.  Each morning, the super was supposed to use ropes to lift a platform and the tenants would put their garbage on the shelf.  It was then  taken down to the basement, and then put in garbage cans (this was before plastics) and placed on the street to await the arrival of the Department of Sanitation trucks, who carried it away to an incinerator on 215th Street (since closed) where a lot of it was burned.  Sometime during or after the war the super stopped picking up the garbage from the dumbwaiter, and the shaft was eventually shut.  We then carried the garbage to the cellar entrance and dumped it there ourselves.

ENTER RENT CONTROL

 The war had another effect on our building: the imposition of rent control in 1943.  At that time the rent on our four-room apartment on the second floor, overlooking a very large backyard, was $45 per month.  It remained at that sum until the cruel Governor Dewey, sometime in the early 1950's, increased the rents by 15 per cent. Without knowing the intermediate steps,  I did learn that by the time my father passed away in 1968 and my mother moved a few blocks away to an elevator building, the rent had risen to $63.60 per month.  My parents and some siblings lived there for 27 years, during a period of substantial inflation, during which the initial rent increased  by 41 per cent.  During that time, the consumer price index increased from l5.5 to 35.3, per cent, or 127 per cent, more than three times as much as the rent we paid..
 
I now live in a co-op in Manhattan.  We own our apartments, so there is no landlord or manager taking profit out of the building.  We have not done extensive renovations.  I was a tenant who became an original shareholder when the owner's estate, in compliance with his wishes, sold us the building at a below-market price after he passed away in 1968.  That was thirty-nine years ago.  During that period, the maintenance for my apartment rose by 478 per cent, not counting the periodic extra months for which we are assessed.  The cost of living rose during the same period (1968-2007) rose from 35.5 to 205.3, which comes out to 473 per cent.  Thus the increase in monthly charges, including maintenance, real estate taxes and mortgage interest, has pretty well matched the increase in the consumer price index since our building went co-op nearly forty years ago.
 
This is not a screed against rent control.  Indeed, if our rent had tripled between 1941 and 1968, we might not have been able to afford it, or rent a share of a summer house in Ronkonkoma during the non air-conditioned (at the time) months of July and August.   The apartment house we lived in was built in a generous scale in 1917, on what would now be called a wetland (Sherman Creek).  The Stern family lived there from its 24th to its 51st year. We saw the coin telephone installed in the first floor vestibule.  After the war, people could purchase individual phones in their apartments.  Today their children have cell phones or Blackberries.  Believe it or not, there are now more cell phones in use in America than land lines.

After we moved into the building, it began to lose its glitter. First to go was the lobby furniture, then the dumbwaiter service.  Nothing was spent that was not absolutely necessary.  The ethnicity of the tenants changed, but relatively slowly.  The house was not at all a bad one. It was sound, habitable housing, the neighbors were friendly although sometimes noisy, and we enjoyed living there.  The agent, a man with a white mustache, came around during the first week of the month to collect the rent.  Sometimes we were late, but we always paid eventually.   We did not know or care how much money the landlord made on the building.  We didn’t even really know who he was.  We thought he had a lot more money than we did, and that was very likely true.
 
On balance, rent control certainly helped our family.  Was it right to take from the rich, or not so rich, for the benefit of the poor?  Would landlords have invested more in buildings if rents had not been controlled?  Some would have, while others would not have.  Some sold their buildings to people who would milk them and then abandon them.   Some collected all the rent they could get while failing to maintain their buildings.  They were called 'slumlords'.
 
The newspapers ran stories on the ten worst landlords in the city.  These people were thieves, and rent control did not make them so.  What we are getting at is the more you get into these problems, the more difficult it is to choose sides.  This is a classic 30-T situation: The truth lies somewhere in between.
 
Shelter is a basic human need, and some interference with the market is necessary on some occasions where a great shortage interferes with freedom of choice by tenants.  How far to go and how long to stay there is another matter.  There are well-to-do people in empty nests on the upper west side and elsewhere.  But nature will take its course, and young families will move into the apartments as vacancies occur.
 
One obvious solution is the construction of what they now call 'affordable housing', which every mayor since Koch has done to some extent.  Koch had a major program in this area and so does Bloomberg. The federal government, however, has diminished its commitment in this area.   But if too much government money goes into building and subsidizing this kind of housing, it could result in another permanent drain on the city's tax base.
 
The current housing preservation and development commissioner, Sean Donovan, is a housing professional and appears to be an able fellow.  We have seen over a dozen people in that office since we began watching.  The office was considered more important many years ago than it is today. (For example, a person of the status of Roger Starr was appointed commissioner by Mayor Beame.)  The lessening of interest in the agency is a sign, either that the problems are diminishing or that they have become intractable.  Assuming the former, which is the more optimistic view, how do we accommodate the million people who are expected to become New Yorkers in the decades ahead of us. The answer may come with the converse of an old slogan, "If they come, we will build it."  Isn't that the way it has always happened?  Supply follows demand.  The problem in New York is paying for the supply, since most of the demand comes from people who cannot afford to pay what it costs to build.  That's where government comes in.  The hard part is doing it right.          

 
 
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