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At least two men have come up with a viable solution to the New York City affordable housing crisis: live at a swanky hotel, for a couple of hundred bucks a month.
“Two cabbies used an obscure law to score sweet apartments near the High Line for as little as $226 a month—even though similar-sized digs in the neighborhood go for around $3,200,” reported the New York Post.
The men, Joe Stevens and Hamidou Guira, both cab drivers, used a provision in the city’s Rent Stabilization code, which allows those who live in buildings that were once SROs (single-room occupancies) to get permanent residency if they request a lease of at least six months, even if they’ve lived in the hotel for less than that. While Stevens had lived at the Chelsea Highline Hotel at 182-184 11th Ave. for 20 years, Guira spent just one night there before submitting a written request to become a permanent resident. “The owner must accept the lease at the regulated rate—$226—and it can be renewed indefinitely,” writes the Post.
As much as this seems like gaming the system, or an abuse of an arcane law, the move comes at a time when tens of thousands of rent-stabilized apartments have been deregulated, and when “the overall share of the population who rents continues to drop, from 84% just after World War II, to about two-thirds now,” reported WNYC. Vacancy is low, demand is high, the pressure is on, both for renters to get their hands on a place to live and on landlords to maximize the profit from their possessions.
The owners of the Chelsea Highline were sufficiently stressed that they tried to keep Guira from his room, but Guira won the right to return.
Will fellow New Yorkers follow suit, and will they set their sights on other accommodations? “That part of the law means that at any hotel in the city, [you] can claim a need for relief like at The Waldorf and the Marriott Marquis,” Joe Restuccia, executive director of the nonprofit Clinton Housing Development Corp., told the Post. “It applies to everybody.”
Meanwhile, the hotel’s website says that as of Aug. 7, it stopped taking reservations. As the Post reported, “Restuccia’s group is partnering with the owners of the hotel to turn the building into 15 units of affordable housing with apartments starting at $800 a month.”
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