Dear Editor:
Amazingly enough, many tenants living in Hoboken may not realize that our town has had rent control laws in place since 1973 and that they may be protected by rent control.
The rent of any Hoboken tenant living in a non-subsidized apartment in a building built before 1987 (and some built after 1987) is regulated by the rent control law. Many rent-controlled tenants are misinformed about their protections. For instance, some tenants believe that if they are paying $1,300 in rent that they are not under rent control because their rent seems too high to be “under rent control.” There is a misconception that if you are under rent control, you must be paying an unusually low rent, such as $400 a month.
Rent control has nothing to do with the amount of rent a tenant is currently paying. One may be paying $600, $1,400, or $2,500 a month and still be under rent control because rent control means that the landlord cannot indiscriminately raise the rent each year to whatever he wants or whatever a tenant will pay. The base rent can only be raised by a percentage specified by the Consumer Price Index (CPI), and the landlord can also include separate surcharges to pay for taxes, and water and sewer costs.
There is this myth that rent control is allowing every high paid professional in town to have an unusually low rent. But a low rent is dependent upon when you moved into the building. If a tenant has lived for many years in the same apartment, and the landlord raised the rent by the allowed CPI each year, then that tenant’s rent would increase much more slowly (and would end up much lower) than if the same apartment frequently changed tenants because rent control allows an additional 25 percent “vacancy decontrol” rent increase once every three years in addition to CPI increases.
If you look at the current U.S. Census Bureau figures for the housing characteristics for Hoboken that was updated between 2006-2010 by the American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates, one will find that out of 15,412 occupied units paying gross rent, 2,308 tenants were paying $1,000 to $1,499 in rent and 8,701 tenants were paying $1,500 or more in rent, for a total of 11,009 tenants that are paying more than $1,000 in monthly rent payments. That means that 71.43 percent of the renting population is paying over $1,000 a month and that 56.46 percent of the renting population is paying over $1,500 or more a month.
It is a myth that all rent control tenants are paying low rents.
Mary Ondrejka