Dear Editor:
I attended a meeting of the Hoboken Fair Housing Association last week and had the good fortune of hearing Matt Shapiro, president of the New Jersey Tenants Association, say a few words. Mr. Shapiro is an attorney who has been intimately involved with tenants’ rights issues in New Jersey for decades. I learned a lot hearing him speak for a few minutes. The most important thing that was impressed upon me is fairly simple once it is pointed out, but not obvious in the artful language of the new anti-rent control proposal that will be going on the ballot in November. It is extremely important to anyone who rents in Hoboken.
If the current initiative put forth by MSTA, the landlord/developer lobbying group, becomes law, it will mean that once a tenant moves out, the landlord is free of any restraint and can charge whatever the market will bear. The proponents say this means that the law will not affect present tenants.
That might be true enough in a perfect world where all people are moral and respectful of other people. Unfortunately that is not the world we live in. If you put the opportunity to gain tens of thousands of dollars, a small fortune, within easy reach of most people, you create a tremendous motivation for them to reach out and grab it. In this case, the only thing a landlord has to do to gain tens of thousands of dollars is to get a tenant out so that then they can jack the rent to a level that only the most affluent can afford. And in Hoboken, with its easy access to Wall Street, finding potential tenants to pay top dollar will not be difficult for landlords.
We are talking about the potential to gain many thousands of dollars on a single unit. If you put that pot of gold in front of most people, it is going to be very hard to resist taking it. That means getting the tenant out, whatever it takes, whether it is harassing legal actions, phone calls, knocking on the windows, or allowing the apartment to fall into such disrepair and dysfunction as to make tenants want to leave. This is not mere speculation, this is history. This is what has happened in many communities in New Jersey. And in Hoboken it would be the worst of all because there is no hotter real estate market than Hoboken.
Whether you are a property owner or not, there are few who would like to see Hoboken go back to the days when hundreds of buildings were burned and many people were killed in order to vacate buildings to make way for real estate fortunes. We do not need to provide that kind of motivation.
Sincerely,
David Cogswell