Since 1954, my family has lived on Pulaski Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant, in the home that I now own after inheriting it from my mother. I’m a central Brooklyn homeowner, and it is because of that — not despite it — that I strongly support Housing Justice for All’s Universal Rent Control platform.
For decades I knew my neighbors and what to expect in my neighborhood: the good, the bad, and the ugly. It was our home – all of ours – and there was a strong sense of community and collective responsibility for the neighborhood and for one another.
But in the past decade or so that has begun to change. Families who have been around for generations are moving; neighbors whom I could rely on I no longer see on the block, or at the park, or at the corner store.
Brooklyn is being bought-out by big-money predatory capitalists who are taking advantage of weak tenant protection laws to speculate and extract the wealth from my neighbors. And the community that is being left behind is not like the one where I grew up and grew old.
It’s devastating to see what is happening. And that’s why, even though I’m a homeowner, I support universal rent control for New York State.
This is something that can be passed this year. But right now the Assembly is not planning on passing the strongest piece of legislation to protect unregulated tenants. We need all of our Brooklyn assembly members and senators to speak up and demand that the entire platform is passed before rent regulation expires on June 15.
Universal rent control is about protecting tenants from bad, usually big corporate landlords who are exploiting our broken rent laws to profit immensely. Outsiders are becoming rich off the backs of hard-working Brooklyn tenants, who have very few choices as rents continue to skyrocket in the borough.
When the rent finally gets too high, they have to leave the neighborhood behind, paving the way for new, wealthier, and usually whiter tenants to come in after them. This is having a severely detrimental effect on my neighborhood and other traditionally neighborhoods of color across Brooklyn.
We are weaker because of it. Community is suffering at the hands of greed. Profit is being prioritized at the expense of people.
The simple fact is that we need universal rent control to protect the hundreds of thousands of tenants in central Brooklyn who are most at risk of being displaced, but also to even the playing field for good landlords, first-time homebuyers, and homeowners who want to keep their community together.
The nine bills in the universal rent control platform – including closing all the egregious loopholes in the state’s rent laws and extending protections to millions of unregulated tenants across the state by ending no-fault evictions – are not about punishing good landlords. In fact, most of the small good landlords already act in a way where they would not be affected by these bills.
Instead, universal rent control would mean that the good landlords who do right by their tenants won’t be forced out of the market by predatory companies that are looking to take every last penny from our friends and neighbors. And it would mean that first-time homebuyers would be able to actually afford to buy homes in our neighborhood, where they can set down roots and raise a family, instead of everything being snatched up by speculators looking to make a quick and easy buck.
As a homeowner in Bed-Stuy, I need my elected officials to be on my side. That is not the side of predatory companies; it’s the side of the tenants, the homeowners, and the community we’ve built together. The only way to protect us is to pass all nine bills in the universal rent control package this year.
Elliot “Skipp” Roseboro is a homeowner in Bedford Stuyvesant
