Spot the good guy
As part of the New York Times’ continuing series of the absurdities of New York City rent control (and its upgrade, rent stabilization), I give you this little morality play:
The Apthorp is located at 2207 Broadway
It began, as all too many
“You think this dump is worth more than $508 a month?”
So they hit upon what the state’s highest court described on Thursday as “a scheme to remove a number of its apartments from the protections of rent regulation.”
Remind me again whom we are protecting?
The idea worked like this: In 1992 the owners rented an apartment to a man named Shlomo Baron, who agreed in his lease not to use the apartment as his primary residence. Using that as an excuse, the owners removed the apartment from rent regulation, and raised the rent to $2,400 a month from $507.85. Mr. Baron never moved in at all; he turned around and immediately sublet the four-room apartment to a couple who agreed to pay $3,250 a month.
Mr. Baron seems to have had unusual foresight, renting an apartment for $2,400 and then being able to sublet it for an $850 monthly profit.
The couple were Cyndi Lauper, she of the song “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,”
“I come home in the morning light
My mother says when you gonna live your life right
Oh mother dear we’re not the fortunate ones
And girls they want to have fun
Oh girls just want to have fun”
and her husband, David Thornton, an actor. They, too, agreed in their lease not to use the apartment as their primary residence (but the courts found that they had indeed done so).
Perhaps Ms. Lauper and Mr. Thornton had an immediate change of heart. Surely they could not have been committing fraud in their lease application.
“Looks perfectly appropriate to me.”
The court said that the building did this kind of thing with at least six apartments.
Evidently Mr. Baron had hit upon an appealing marketing strategy. How else could one rent apartments for $508 a month?
According to its web site, “Putti are gingerly tucked beneath handsome cornice”
Perhaps one could rent to the putti?
Things seemed to go well for a spell. Then the lawsuits began.
First, in 1996, Ms. Lauper and Mr. Thornton sued Mr. Baron, claiming they were being overcharged under the rent stabilization law. A court ruled that Mr. Baron’s tenancy in the apartment was “illusory,” that the
Mr. Baron said he would not use the apartment as his primary residence — and did what he said. Ms. Lauper and Mr. Thornton said they would not use the apartment as their primary residence — and did something else. Who said honesty is the best policy?
In 2000, the couple sued the building’s owners, asking them to set the rent back to $507.85 a month.
The owners, citing the law’s four-year statute of limitations for challenging rents, offered to cut the rent to $2,496, the base rent it had charged four years earlier. The matter went back to court.
On Thursday the Court of Appeals ruled 5 to 2 that setting the rent at $2,496 would have the effect of “rewarding the owner’s wrongdoing.”
“And we want to reward the tenant’s wrongdoing, don’t we?”
They affirmed a lower court’s decision that the new rent should be set according to a state formula that calls for using the lowest rent charged for a rent-stabilized apartment with the same number of rooms in the same building. That would make the rent $988.56 a month.
Have you spotted the good guy yet?
Keep looking …
