Link: Low Rent, East Side Location - See Landlord, if You’re Famous
A fascinating article which demonstrates how powerful the urban landed gentry are. They can pick and choose their tenants, offering particularly well-connected people well-located luxury housing at a discount.
Which tenant is going to say no, on anything that matters to such a benefactor? Moving is so inconvenient, and finding a similar location, particularly subsidized, difficult.
A rent-stabilized apartment in New York is a precious find. Which could explain the indignation that greeted the disclosure that Representative Charles B. Rangel was occupying four of them in the luxurious Lenox Terrace towers in Harlem, where Gov. David A. Paterson also has one.
Throughout the city, the well-connected (or just plain lucky) have been able to snare such prizes and retain them over the years.
But few rental buildings in the city have been as hospitable to public officials, past and present, as the Rudin Management Company’s high rise at 215 East 68th Street, where a shouted, “Good morning, your honor!” could turn every head in the lobby.
Bernard Spitzer has to report and pay a gift tax each year on his son Eliott's free occupancy of an apartment that would rent for $250,000 or so per year. Does Mr. Rudin or his company do the same? Many of these discounts are well over the gift tax horizon.
I wonder what the political campaign donations for this building look like compared with other buildings in the neighborhood.
Does rent stabilization get the building owners a reduction in their property taxes? If so, who is subsidizing these wealthy and well-connected tenants? It seems to me it is the working people of New York City -- who suffer wage taxes and sales taxes in order to keep property taxes low for the owners of NYC's most valuable resource: LAND!
A bastion of privilege, handed out by those who have it to offer: the urban landed gentry. In this case corporate, but no less powerful than the landed gentry anywhere else. They control a scarce and finite resource on which we all depend. Air, water, land. He who controls them can demand whatever price he chooses, in whatever currency!
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