There’s a wide variety of interpretations of a 10-page rent control measure up for a final vote before the City Council Wednesday night, and activists say they hope the council removes it from the agenda so that the affected parties can have more time to understand it. The ordinance pertains to several aspects of rent control and to a federally-subsidized tenant voucher system, and the parties affected by it had different takes on its purpose and ramifications last week. City officials say the measure will protect the interests of tenants who live in certain types of buildings. But one prominent tenants’ rights activist believes it will weaken all rent control. Right now, most buildings in town are subject to the city’s 1973 Rent Control Law. That law forces landlords in Hoboken to keep their rent increases to a small percentage each year. The changes up for a vote Wednesday do not pertain to most of the buildings in town. Some of them apply only to buildings where residents depend on federal vouchers to pay a percent of their monthly rent, including the 16 low- and moderate-income properties managed by Applied Housing; Clock Towers; Church Towers; and Marine View Plaza – and other changes apply to two-family owner-occupied buildings (see sidebar). Despite the complexity of the document, the City Council voted to introduce it at its last meeting. The measure is now scheduled to go to a second and final reading Wednesday. Carole McLaughlin, the division chief of the Rent Leveling and Stabilization Department, told the council at their last meeting that due to changes the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is making in the way it administers federal subsidy programs, landlords who own buildings that have had agreements with the agency to maintain a fixed number of subsidized units will no longer be bound by those agreements. Federal vouchers that tenants can use to pay a portion of their rents will become “transportable,” meaning that they go wherever tenants choose to take them. They will no longer be tied to an individual building, landlord or apartment. Even though this new system provides the tenant with choices, McLaughlin says the city needs to act to protect tenants who use vouchers from vulnerabilities created by the change. “The people who could truly be hurt by this change are the people who are paying 30 percent of their income towards rent and allowing the subsidy to make up the difference,” McLaughlin said in an interview this week. “If we don’t put this ordinance in place, developers can come into the city and buy a building like Clock Towers and then they might decide that they do not want to be involved with the government and [accept] vouchers anymore. Those tenants would have to begin paying the full rent and that could be really detrimental to them.” As a result, city officials have developed an agreement that officials claim will protect the ability of vouchered tenants to stay where they are and continue to be able to pay the same portion of their rent with government subsidies. However, there is some question as to whether the rent aspect of the proposed agreements would stand, as the state’s Department of Community affairs will begin controlling the rents of the buildings after HUD relinquishes control. The state can also make individual agreements with the property owners about the rents and about how many low-income tenants they must accept. As it stands right now, the rents in the buildings in question are kept artificially low through HUD guidelines. They are not covered by the city’s 1973 Rent Control Law, and all rent increases had been administered only with HUD approval. Under the terms of the proposed agreement, landlords will keep their vouchered tenants in place and place 30 percent of their total units in the building under the city’s Rent Control Law. In return, they will be allowed to increase rents in the remaining units in their buildings to market rates once the current tenants voluntarily vacate, officials say. However, the landlords would only be able to use this “vacancy decontrol” once to boost rental rates to the market value. After that, the units would begin to fall under the Rent Control Law. McLaughlin said that the state’s Department of Community Affairs already had entered into an agreement regarding nine of the 16 properties owned and managed by the Applied Companies. However, she noted that seven other properties managed by Applied and a handful of other properties in town, including Church Towers, Clock Towers and Marine View Towers, were still in the process of terminating relationships with the government that had governed the way rents were established for years. The Wednesday ordinance will pertain to those properties and codify the agreement for the nine Applied properties. At least one tenants’ rights activist is unhappy with the proposal. Daniel Tumpson, who has studied the ordinance, said that he did not see anything in the law that said tenants who depend on federal subsidies will be protected. “There is nothing in this ordinance that says that landlords have to keep accepting vouchers,” Tumpson said. When asked to point to the part of the ordinance states that landlords have to keep accepting vouchers, McLaughlin looked the 10-page ordinance over for a moment and then explained that it assumes the landlord has a separate agreement with the state to accept vouchers, although she said the ordinance does not state this explicitly. “All we know is second- and third-hand as to whether there are any agreements to keep voucher tenants in place,” Tumpson said. “All I see is a 70 percent gratis giveaway to landlords who are in this situation that allows them to circumvent the law and jack rents up to market value.” Tumpson said that what concerned him most about the changes was that they gave the appearance of protecting tenants who live in the buildings, when actually they may be putting them in jeopardy. “This is a big incentive for a landlord to get rid of his tenants,” said Tumpson. “Even though it sounds like nothing is going to happen until the tenants leave, landlords stand to gain twice as much money or maybe even more for apartments once tenants leave, and that creates a great deal of pressure.” However, there are state laws specifying that landlords can only remove tenants for “just cause,” such as non-payment of rent or creating a nuisance for other tenants. Theoretically, no tenants will have to leave these buildings. But that can’t stop landlords from trying to prove a just cause where one may not exist. This is not the first time the City Council has tried to take action to make changes regarding rent control. In 1989 and 1994, the council passed vacancy decontrol measures pertaining to small owner-occupied buildings, but tenant activists gathered enough signatures to force a referendum on the issue. The City Council wanted to avoid the referendum, so they repeal the measures. Of the newest proposal, Tumpson said, “This is an enormous vacancy decontrol measure. If they are so sure that this is the best thing for the community, why don’t they let the City Council take its time before they consider it? Instead they are being totally sneaky about a huge issue. They have only given us only the necessary two weeks before they plan to act on this, and that is not a lot of time to get the word out. All information about this has been suppressed, and they give you very little time to fight it.” Joe Barry, the president of Applied Housing, said the city ordinance ultimately serves the needs of the residents of those buildings. Barry explained that the buildings were set up 20 to 25 years ago to serve low-income families in Hoboken who depended on federal subsidies. They were established as Limited Dividend Housing Corporations. This meant that in exchange for a tax abatement, they were subject to laws that put a ceiling on the profit a developer could earn. “Once these buildings become free of federal control, they are not free of [all] control,” he said. “We are still subject to state regulation.” The problem, he said, is that after 20 or 25 years of federal regulation, the rents are so artificially low in these buildings that it is impossible for the landlord to generate the resources necessary to maintain and make improvements to them. “Once rents start falling behind market-rate, you begin facing deteriorating buildings because landlords simply are not generating enough revenue to maintain them,” he said. “That is obviously bad for the tenants but it also hurts the city because the value of the property goes down and the taxes decrease. Any housing needs re-investment. It does not stay perfect forever.” Barry pointed to the buildings maintained by the Hoboken Housing Authority on the west side of town as an example of what happens when maintaining rents at an artificially low rate becomes the only objective. “I think that the tenant advocates are way off-base,” Barry added, “because they are saying that rents should never rise, and that’s not good housing policy. This ordinance is a compromise that says that low-income tenants can continue to live there, but that in the future, tenants who want to live there and are making $200,000 a year should not be able to just pay $600 a month in rent. Instead they should pay something more reflective of the market because that money can be used to keep the building in shape.” Ultimately, Barry said that the ordinance may not determine the rents charged in these buildings. “The state controls the rents anyhow,” he said, “so even if no ordinance passes, landlords would not be able to charge whatever they wanted. So in a sense, this is a fight over matters that are not solely in the city’s control.” At least one council person said that she did not plan to support the ordinance. “At this point in time I’m not supporting it,” said Council President Nellie Moyeno, who fought the last vacancy decontrol proposal. “I have always been an advocate for tenants. I’d have to feel really comfortable with the ordinance and right now I’m not comfortable with it. I just have a problem with an automatic jump to market value. You could have a unit that starts at $600 and then skyrockets to double or triple that. Who can afford that? I would prefer to keep whatever low income units we have left.” Still others said that they wished the city had gone further in taking action to amend the Rent Control Law. “There are a whole lot of things that they could be doing and should be doing to make this law work better,” said Hank Forrest, who sat on a City Council-appointed task force that looked at possible amendments to the Rent Control Law in 1996. (A thick document was presented to the council stating the task force’s findings, but no further action was taken.) “But this is probably the most they could do without creating a real uproar around town.”