The landlords and developers argue that these new amenities are "market tools" to attract high-end tenants who will pay market rates for apartments. Therefore, the amenities should be reserved for such residents. Actually, this only makes sense if you assume the potential high-end renter cares who else will be using the gym or playroom. In other words, the landlords and developers are assuming their clientele have the same class bias and resentments as themselves. Based on this assumption, some of them have gone so far as to put in separate lobbies and entrances (nicknamed "poor doors") for those living in rent-regulated apartments.
Here is how David Von Spreckelsen, the president of the development company Toll Brothers City Living puts it, "The two populations [rent-regulated and market rate payers] don't mix at all. It really feels separate." Of course, after Mr. Von Spreckelsen gets done segregating the two groups of tenants, his statement becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The fact that the practices of Mr. Von Spreckelsen and those like him are making rent-regulated tenants feel like, as one of them put it, "a second-class citizen in my own home" seems not to matter. That is probably because, in the landlord and developer's capitalist worldview, the tenants residing in such apartments are indeed, by definition, second-class citizens.
Part IV -- The Need for Regulation
Alas for Von Spreckelsen, the rent-regulated tenants are also voting citizens. There are hundreds of thousands of them in New York City, and their complaints have reached the mayor's office and city council. Newly elected mayor Bill de Blasio had made an issue of the "dwindling availability of affordable housing" in his campaign for office, and some city council members are busy drafting legislation that would "expand the city's anti-discrimination code to include rent-regulated tenants."
However, one should not see this as much more than a holding action against an ongoing and successful effort by landlords and developers to erode the number of rent-regulated apartments they have to maintain. One can see it in the annual decreasing percentage of rent-controlled residences: 2002 = 2.8%; 2005 = 2.1%; 2008 = 1.9 %; 2011 = 1.8%. Those in the rent-stabilized category have fallen from 63% in 1980 to 47% in 2011.
Some of this decline is the result of attrition. Those in these affordable apartments are generally an older crowd. However, perhaps more important in the long run is that the landlords and developers have the nation's economic ideology on their side as well as a lot of money to pay out to ambitious politicians. Ultimately, New York City may well become a city gentrified for the wealthy. The poor will have nowhere else to go but the next slum over, and the middle class will be pushed out altogether, largely to the towns and suburbs of New Jersey.
Part V -- Conclusion
The condition of the New York City's real estate market is symptomatic of a much broader problem of class discrimination and segregation. You can see it in the wealth-based segregated nature of everything from accommodations on trains and planes to the more serious discrepancies between suburbs and inner cities. In the fields of health care and criminal justice, the wealthy go in one door and the rest of us in another. In this country exceedingly little comes to you because you are a human being, or even because you are a citizen. Almost everything you get, or don't get, is a function of how much you can or are willing to pay.
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