Hart Island (where the occupant was buried) has an interesting history:
"The remains of more than one million people are buried on Hart Island, though since the first decade of the 21st century, there are fewer than 1,500 burials a year. Burials on Hart Island include individuals who were not claimed by their families or did not have private funerals; the homeless and the indigent; and mass burials of disease victims."
Rarely, there are tours. The dock is on the east side of City Island. Incarcerated NYS/NYC prisoners are conscripted for burial and brush cleanup duty, so you would occasionally see those buses parked at the dock.
> At one time, there were many affordable places where a single person like Hasegawa could live in New York City. Many hotels offered accommodations consisting of a single bed in a cubicle, or a private room with a shared kitchen and bathroom.
> In the mid-20th century there were close to 200,000 units designated as SROs — single room occupancy. But by the 1970s, they had gained a reputation as hotbeds for criminal activity and the city began to shut them down.
So it was common at that time for hotels to offer long-term apartment rentals, but no longer.
It's kind of maddening that cities cracked down on SROs because of crime and then complain about all the homeless people and crime they have on the streets. What did they think was going to happen? That residents were going to move into proper apartments? They probably would have already if they could, so now the problems are worse as a result.
The article briefly mentions the definition, but not in detail. They're part of Single Room Occupancy (SRO) programs for affordable housing in big cities. SROs have fallen out of favor with no good alternative, but they've been a lifeline for friends of mine.
A little known fact is that hotels constructed in New York City "before July 1, 1969 which cost less than $88 per week or $350 per month on May 31, 1968" are subject to a law that states that guests are entitled to become a permanent tenant by requesting a lease of six months or more, and hotels are generally barred from preventing such people from doing such that.
There's someone who has been trying to claim ownership through this mechanism of the New Yorker hotel across from Penn Station, with surprising amounts of success:
NYC used to have a lot of Single Room Occupancy (SRO) residential hotels that functioned more like cheap apartments. Rent stabilization applies to buildings built before 1974 and kicks in for residents once they’ve been in a place for 6 months. Years ago the city changed the zoning laws to restrict SROs so there aren’t nearly as many as there were in the 80’s but a few have stuck around.
Everyone has kinda answered your question about these old practices carrying over. We're seeing the end of the last surviving hotel residents - recently NYT covered the eviction of an 82-year-old, who took over a contract from his aunt https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/08/nyregion/stewart-hotel-lo...
Nikola Tesla famously died in his residential room at the New Yorker Hotel, and I recently learned that after his presidency, Herbert Hoover lived at the Waldolf Astoria for 30 years.
> Rent stabilization sets maximum rates for annual rent increases and, as with rent control, entitles tenants to receive required services from their landlords along with lease renewals. The rent guidelines board meets every year to determine how much the landlord can charge. Violations may cause a tenant's rent to be lowered.
> I did find this wiki page on rent regulation in NY, it mentions something about rent control and living continuously in a place since a certain cutoff date:
That's rent control, not rent stabilization. There is no cutoff date for rent stabilization. Different units became stabilized for a variety of different reasons over the years.
For what it's worth, I had never heard of a rent-stabilized hotel room either. (American) From some other comments here, it sounds like the accommodations were more of an apartment than a hotel room.
One of the less talked about aspects of rent stabilized apartments is how people become trapped in them.
I know people who have been living in rent stabilized apartments in NYC for decades who will never let them go, even though they no longer like the neighborhood or the unit.
Of course, it is hard to feel sorry for someone living in a $1,200/mo 1-bedroom in a nice area in Manhattan.
I briefly lived in Manhattan, and I think my neighbor across the hall was in such a unique situation.
The building was an old one in the center of Manhattan, but newly renovated. I moved in in 2021, and I think everybody had moved in within the last 5 years. There were a bunch of young professionals that had graduated from NYU and such.
But this guy was the only one without the iPhone electronic lock on his door -- and good for him, the iPhone locks are a reason why I moved out of the building! (Unsurprisingly, the locks once malfunctioned and we were locked out of the building. Computers make everything work very poorly these days.)
Anyway, I chatted with him in the elevator, and once asked when he moved in. I believe he said 1989 -- anyway, it was like 3 decades.
He didn't look to be more than 40, so I guess he must have lived there as a child, and inherited the apartment.
Also, whenever I talked to him, he would say something super political without prompting, like "Adams is fucking slob, under Giuliani we had law and order" or something.
(Also, he was black, which may break your mental image a bit.)
A bit of an aside because it sounds like he really did live there full-time, but another reason why people in RS units wouldn't want an phone-enabled lock on their door is it possibly gives the landlord information on how often they come and go.
Some people who have units like that live somewhere else but just can't bring themselves to let the things go, so they use them as storage and go by once a week to check the mail.
I had a rent controlled apartment in Midtown for ~$1300/mo. It's the apartment I grew up in and I finally got fed up and left two years ago.
The landlord put giant holes in my floor to get access to some pipes and wouldn't fix them for over a year.
After leaving the landlord tried to bill tens of thousands of dollars to bring the apartment up to their current standards -- even though we'd been in there since 1970 and the landlord never spent a cent on modernizing the apartment along the way. 100% of the renovations and upgrades we did ourselves. The apartment was left in great condition.
I completely agree with you that it's a trap. The place made me completely miserable and even though at the end I finally earned decent money to leave, I chose to leave the city entirely.
> rent controlled apartment in Midtown for ~$1300/mo
> landlord tried to bill tens of thousands of dollars to bring the apartment up to their current standards
> landlord never spent a cent on modernizing the apartment along the way
Surely you see that these are directly connected. With an increasing cost of living and a legally fixed profitability per month that isn't going up over time nor keeping up with inflation, from the landlord's perspective, there's little to no incentive for them to fork over cash they never got from the apartment to put back into it. At that point the only incentive is to hold onto the property itself and wait for its value to increase while deducting depreciation, and perversely, they are incentivized to make you as uncomfortable as possible since they cannot raise the rent on the unit until you move.
It's my opinion that if we want rent control, there should be a cap on the amount of time that ends sooner than "on death", especially if you're not old. (For old people who are basically living in the last unit of their lives, it makes sense to me to rent-control those).
My friend has a rent controlled -- huge LR, kitchen, dining room, 2 hallways, 2 bedrooms, 1 bath, 18 foot ceilings, in low 80s upper east side. $500/month. I think his neighbor's rent is like $6500. Yeah he's not leaving.
Living the high life, literally in terms of the ceilings. Having ceilings like that is so mind-blowing in a living space, as it opens everything up drastically. That is an insane rent. From the description, the size is great. What is the condition and quality of the place? And I'm not all that familiar with New York's neighborhoods. Is low 80s upper east side a good neighborhood?
I feel the same for people with near 0% interest rate mortgages. Like we bought a starter home prior to the pandemic. Buying the same home now would be 3.5x the monthly mortgage payment. Buying a slightly nicer, 1 extra bedroom near our neighborhood is completely out of the question. Since no one wants to move because rates are so high it creates a vicious loop of more buyers than inventory on sale.
Can you not port mortgages in America? I have 4 years left on my mortgage, if I want to move though I can simply sell this place, buy somewhere new, and phone up my mortgage company and take the debt with me - as long as the new place is about the same or more than the current place (so the LTV stays the same or better).
Yep. It's using the fed to reallocate money from the inflated cash based poor to the credit rich home owner. Home owners are basically using government induced negative real interest rates to regressively tax non-homeowners.
We got blown away by the pandemic that locked up the housing stock. So I cheated and built my own house for like 1/4 the cost it is on the market as it's almost all markup from the opportunity cost of losing the 0% loan.
For those that have lost hope seriously consider a prefab for like 60k dropped on some vacant land. Where I live you don't even need inspections or license to do it yourself. But you need to develop the land yourself, and not hire out a GC, because developers will always be chasing high margin luxury builds rather than the low margin methods I've discovered for economical housing.
Do you mean rent stablized specifically vs controlled?
About 1% of NYC apartments are rent controlled, about 50% are rent stabilized.
In controlled units you might see a minor increase over time, but generally you're paying what the unit was priced at 50 years ago. Leaving typically means an increase in rent of 500-700%, and these are practically impossible for new tenants to get.
In stablized units the rent can only be increased by a percentage determined by a board, typically 2-3% a year.
Stabilized units can increase something like 4% a year, up until they hit the threshold that takes them out of stabilization.
Controlled units can increase 2% every two years and historically did not do so from the 90s until a few years ago where increases have been happening and the housing board has advocated on behalf of landlords for additional/emergency increases.
Rent increases can happen completely separate from this process through building improvements and from the late 80s through to the early 2000s, my landlord managed to add $700 onto our controlled rent through really shady/shoddy/fake building improvements.
Growing up about 80% of the units in the building were rent-controlled and when I left there was was only 1 controlled unit left after mine. Nobody in my family, even though they all still live in NYC, wanted to take over the apartment.
Most controlled apartment renters die and have nobody eligible to take them over (an immediate family member has to cohabitate for like 2 years with the renter). The number remaining across all of NYC is exceedingly small, like under 15000. There are ~4 million housing units in NYC. Rent-controlled apartments are true unicorns. But close to 75% are stabilized.
They would do shit like slap a coat of primer on the hallways and add $50/mo in permanent rent to everyone's bill (90 unit building).
I lived in a nice apartment building in Toronto from 2015-2020. One couple in the building had lived in the same rent-stabilized apartment there since 1967.
On the bright side, it was a well-maintained building in a good neighborhood, so they had reasons to enjoy it being just the price.
I think most people 'trapped' in a rent-stabilized apartment would prefer it to homelessness.
I understand this may make the neighbours feel jealous, but hey, I'm jealous of my neighbour who bought his house for 1/3rd of what I paid for mine... Life's not fair.
One of my grand-uncles lived in the Park Plaza Hotel. He was a widower, a WWII vet, and loved the city. I was a kid at the time so assumed his lifestyle was closer to "The Suite Life of Zack and Cody" and didn't know what an SRO was. I assumed he was able to afford it on his Army pension, LOL!
Readit News
"The remains of more than one million people are buried on Hart Island, though since the first decade of the 21st century, there are fewer than 1,500 burials a year. Burials on Hart Island include individuals who were not claimed by their families or did not have private funerals; the homeless and the indigent; and mass burials of disease victims."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hart_Island
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hart+Island/
> At one time, there were many affordable places where a single person like Hasegawa could live in New York City. Many hotels offered accommodations consisting of a single bed in a cubicle, or a private room with a shared kitchen and bathroom.
> In the mid-20th century there were close to 200,000 units designated as SROs — single room occupancy. But by the 1970s, they had gained a reputation as hotbeds for criminal activity and the city began to shut them down.
So it was common at that time for hotels to offer long-term apartment rentals, but no longer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy
There's someone who has been trying to claim ownership through this mechanism of the New Yorker hotel across from Penn Station, with surprising amounts of success:
https://viewfromthewing.com/new-york-city-transfers-hotel-de...
Nikola Tesla famously died in his residential room at the New Yorker Hotel, and I recently learned that after his presidency, Herbert Hoover lived at the Waldolf Astoria for 30 years.
edit:
> Rent stabilization sets maximum rates for annual rent increases and, as with rent control, entitles tenants to receive required services from their landlords along with lease renewals. The rent guidelines board meets every year to determine how much the landlord can charge. Violations may cause a tenant's rent to be lowered.
Basically a cap on rent increases, looks like.
That's rent control, not rent stabilization. There is no cutoff date for rent stabilization. Different units became stabilized for a variety of different reasons over the years.
I know people who have been living in rent stabilized apartments in NYC for decades who will never let them go, even though they no longer like the neighborhood or the unit.
Of course, it is hard to feel sorry for someone living in a $1,200/mo 1-bedroom in a nice area in Manhattan.
The building was an old one in the center of Manhattan, but newly renovated. I moved in in 2021, and I think everybody had moved in within the last 5 years. There were a bunch of young professionals that had graduated from NYU and such.
But this guy was the only one without the iPhone electronic lock on his door -- and good for him, the iPhone locks are a reason why I moved out of the building! (Unsurprisingly, the locks once malfunctioned and we were locked out of the building. Computers make everything work very poorly these days.)
Anyway, I chatted with him in the elevator, and once asked when he moved in. I believe he said 1989 -- anyway, it was like 3 decades.
He didn't look to be more than 40, so I guess he must have lived there as a child, and inherited the apartment.
Also, whenever I talked to him, he would say something super political without prompting, like "Adams is fucking slob, under Giuliani we had law and order" or something.
(Also, he was black, which may break your mental image a bit.)
A bit of an aside because it sounds like he really did live there full-time, but another reason why people in RS units wouldn't want an phone-enabled lock on their door is it possibly gives the landlord information on how often they come and go.
Some people who have units like that live somewhere else but just can't bring themselves to let the things go, so they use them as storage and go by once a week to check the mail.
The landlord put giant holes in my floor to get access to some pipes and wouldn't fix them for over a year.
After leaving the landlord tried to bill tens of thousands of dollars to bring the apartment up to their current standards -- even though we'd been in there since 1970 and the landlord never spent a cent on modernizing the apartment along the way. 100% of the renovations and upgrades we did ourselves. The apartment was left in great condition.
I completely agree with you that it's a trap. The place made me completely miserable and even though at the end I finally earned decent money to leave, I chose to leave the city entirely.
Best decision of my life.
> landlord tried to bill tens of thousands of dollars to bring the apartment up to their current standards
> landlord never spent a cent on modernizing the apartment along the way
Surely you see that these are directly connected. With an increasing cost of living and a legally fixed profitability per month that isn't going up over time nor keeping up with inflation, from the landlord's perspective, there's little to no incentive for them to fork over cash they never got from the apartment to put back into it. At that point the only incentive is to hold onto the property itself and wait for its value to increase while deducting depreciation, and perversely, they are incentivized to make you as uncomfortable as possible since they cannot raise the rent on the unit until you move.
It's my opinion that if we want rent control, there should be a cap on the amount of time that ends sooner than "on death", especially if you're not old. (For old people who are basically living in the last unit of their lives, it makes sense to me to rent-control those).
Deleted Comment
We got blown away by the pandemic that locked up the housing stock. So I cheated and built my own house for like 1/4 the cost it is on the market as it's almost all markup from the opportunity cost of losing the 0% loan.
For those that have lost hope seriously consider a prefab for like 60k dropped on some vacant land. Where I live you don't even need inspections or license to do it yourself. But you need to develop the land yourself, and not hire out a GC, because developers will always be chasing high margin luxury builds rather than the low margin methods I've discovered for economical housing.
For those of us here, that’s probably well within reason in most of the country where you can buy a house for <$600k
About 1% of NYC apartments are rent controlled, about 50% are rent stabilized.
In controlled units you might see a minor increase over time, but generally you're paying what the unit was priced at 50 years ago. Leaving typically means an increase in rent of 500-700%, and these are practically impossible for new tenants to get.
In stablized units the rent can only be increased by a percentage determined by a board, typically 2-3% a year.
That's not true.
Stabilized units can increase something like 4% a year, up until they hit the threshold that takes them out of stabilization.
Controlled units can increase 2% every two years and historically did not do so from the 90s until a few years ago where increases have been happening and the housing board has advocated on behalf of landlords for additional/emergency increases.
Rent increases can happen completely separate from this process through building improvements and from the late 80s through to the early 2000s, my landlord managed to add $700 onto our controlled rent through really shady/shoddy/fake building improvements.
Growing up about 80% of the units in the building were rent-controlled and when I left there was was only 1 controlled unit left after mine. Nobody in my family, even though they all still live in NYC, wanted to take over the apartment.
Most controlled apartment renters die and have nobody eligible to take them over (an immediate family member has to cohabitate for like 2 years with the renter). The number remaining across all of NYC is exceedingly small, like under 15000. There are ~4 million housing units in NYC. Rent-controlled apartments are true unicorns. But close to 75% are stabilized.
They would do shit like slap a coat of primer on the hallways and add $50/mo in permanent rent to everyone's bill (90 unit building).
Right -- that's not a trap; it's a choice.
On the bright side, it was a well-maintained building in a good neighborhood, so they had reasons to enjoy it being just the price.
I understand this may make the neighbours feel jealous, but hey, I'm jealous of my neighbour who bought his house for 1/3rd of what I paid for mine... Life's not fair.
This story becomes way less interesting, and way more common (NYC), once that info is understood.