Dear Editor:
It was two and one half years ago that I first began to understand just how corrosive the rent control ordinance in Hoboken had become, not just to property owners, but to the fiscal health of the city and the condition of the housing stock. In 22 years of opposing rent control, I had never seen a situation remotely as dysfunctional and inequitable as what I found in Hoboken.
Now we are on the verge of the most minimal changes to the ordinance, after a bruising and wearying process, and there remains purely political opposition to reversing the inequities that bad policy and worse administration have wrought. It is not an abrogation of tenant protections to assert the manifest rights of property owners. Hoboken can’t afford that perspective any more in any sense of the word, and the opposition we see is a clear instruction that the paradigm shift is needed.
Tenant leaders fear that passing these amendments should be the beginning of a long-term dismantling of the ordinance. We should only be so lucky.
Ron Simoncini