[ After surviving the worst of the pandemic, the city now faces
budget cuts that seem to promise even more disruption. The average
rent of a Manhattan apartment is now reaching $5,249 a month, an
increase of nearly 20 percent over the previous year.]
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‘FRANKENSTEIN’ APARTMENTS AND WEAK LIBRARIES: IS THIS NEW
YORK’S FUTURE?  
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Ginia Bellafante
March 10, 2023
New York Times
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_ After surviving the worst of the pandemic, the city now faces
budget cuts that seem to promise even more disruption. The average
rent of a Manhattan apartment is now reaching $5,249 a month, an
increase of nearly 20 percent over the previous year. _

A new study says that housing costs are driving the financial woes of
New Yorkers., Credit: José A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York Times

 

On Thursday afternoon, a number of local politicians and tenants’
groups came together in the East Village to draw attention to a
practice known as “Frankensteining,” which, in the context of New
York City’s housing crisis, has emerged as a newly born
grotesquerie. The term refers to a loophole in an otherwise
tenant-friendly 2019 law that allows landlords to circumvent rent
regulations by reconfiguring an apartment — chopping it up or
combining it with a second one or simply expanding it through the
addition of hallway or other appropriated common space.

Its floor plan remade, the unit then typically falls out of government
purview, leaving the landlord to charge more or less whatever he
wants. In one building on East 26th Street, this creative approach to
profit building contributed to the loss of 39 rent-stabilized units
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2020 and 2022. Against so many initial projections, Covid did not
result in a great exodus from New York City, and a price slash; in
November, the average rent for a Manhattan apartment reached $5,249,
an increase of nearly 20 percent over the previous year.

Frankensteining is merely one of the more novel ways that low- and
middle-income New Yorkers are under assault as the pandemic recedes
and the economy reshapes itself. An emergency rental assistance
program has since ended even as housing costs have gone up; so too has
the additional federal aid that was given to recipients of food
assistance at a moment when inflation has caused grocery prices to
soar. And now, budget proposals being negotiated at the city, state
and federal levels seem to carry the promise of only more disruption.

In the current fiscal plans, for example, the Adams administration and
the City Council have called for what amounts to a $36 million cut to
libraries, where so many New Yorkers go for internet access and
literacy services. Among other potential negative outcomes, this would
threaten the existence of a popular new program for teenagers; in one
branch, a media lab and recording studio draws students from all over
the city after school. This would come, however paradoxically, when
the mayor has announced a broad mental-health initiative focused on
the well-being of children and adolescents whose afflictions grew
exponentially during the pandemic.

The austerity extends to children farther down the age chart,
specifically to a proposed $568 million reduction
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spending on preschool for 3-year-olds, essentially ending the
expansions planned during the de Blasio administration. This is to say
nothing of the fact that the city has spent the past year struggling
to pay preschool providers
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whom it outsources so much early education and day care, leaving at
least one major operator to close.

Some of these cuts might not be necessary if there were more
enthusiasm at the state level to make modest adjustments to the
corporate tax code. While Gov. Kathy Hochul’s $227 billion state
budget
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for extending a tax increase on large corporations set to expire at
the end of this year, it does not call for increasing them. In a
recent brief, the Fiscal Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research
group, pointed out that a rise of 1.25 percent would generate another
$1.7 billion annually. That new rate, of 8.5 percent, would not be
unprecedented; in fact, it would go back to what it was two decades
ago. Right now, New York’s top corporate tax rate is lower than
the comparable figure in 19 other states including Massachusetts,
Minnesota and New Jersey.
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Beyond that, the Fiscal Policy Institute has suggested that the state
could piggyback on federal laws that extract taxes from multinationals
that otherwise try to avoid them in this country by shifting around
their profits on paper. That, the group’s research shows, could
generate approximately another billion dollars in revenue.

While the governor’s budget allocates significant funds to deal with
the migrant crisis, most of which is unfolding in New York City, it
also proposes a 3 percent tuition increase at public colleges and
universitie
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where reserves are low and the enrollment of financially struggling
students is high. A letter sent last month to deans and presidents of
the City University of New York system from its chief operating
officer ordered them each to devise “a savings plan” achieved
through cutbacks and, vaguely, “the generation of additional
revenues.”

The budget is one that as Nathan Gusdorf, the executive director of
the Fiscal Policy Institute and a former tax lawyer put it, “really
does increase the ordinary cost of living for ordinary New Yorkers.”
Data released from the institute earlier this week showed that,
contrary to popular belief, the number of millionaires in New York
State _increased_ during the pandemic, going from close to 70,000 in
2020 to more than 84,000 the following year. If anything
is propelling migration out of the city
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it is housing prices, not taxes on the very wealthy. The prospect of
Frankensteining is more likely to convince people that it is time to
abandon Brooklyn for Tampa.

_[GINIA BELLAFANTE writes the Big City
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on the politics, culture and life of New York City. She has served as
a reporter, critic and, since 2011, as the Big City columnist
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Times as a fashion critic, and has also been a television critic. She
previously worked at Time magazine. @GiniaNYT
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* New York City
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* Austerity
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* budget cuts
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* rents
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* high rents
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* rent stabilization
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* zombie rents
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* COVID-19
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* Libraries
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* Public Libraries
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* schools
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* public schools
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* Education
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* Mayor Eric Adams
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* Gov. Kathy Hochul
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* Manhattan
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