Search
This is proof that Bloomberg doesn't give a rat's ass about affordable housing in the city
[via wcbstv.com - City Employee Residency Requirement Nixed]:
(CBS) NEW YORK The city's largest employees union confirmed Thursday afternoon that it had reached a historic agreement with Mayor Michael Bloomberg that, among other things, eliminates the requirement that city employees live in one of the five burroughs.District Council 37 announced the agreement to terminate the residency requirement on its Web site, and a union official confirmed the information to CBS2. D.C. 37 endorsed Bloomberg early on in his most recent re-election campaign. The mayor's office has not yet commented.
The residency requirement has been in place for decades.
Other city employees unions are still working to reach agreements with the city.
Manhattanites are screwed. This is going to hit us worse than any of the other boroughs. From now on, only rich people will be allowed to live in NYC, especially Manhattan.
I take this as a stab in the back to the non-unionized working class in the city. Instead of fighting for affordable housing, they take the exurban way out; taking with them millions of dollars in taxes as well.
How many years now til they repeal the rent stabilization laws? I give it 5 years.
a friend just pinged me to say i'm wrong
that supposedly this will free the market and rents will go down.
i wish that were true; but i am going to go with my instinct on this one. if we take stuyvesant-town as a sample of the rent-controlled market, then most people living in rent controlled apartments are city employees.
with nothing now to hold them to the city, two things can happen :
(1) people will leave
(2) landlords now have an excuse to evict rent-controlled dwellers with homes outside the city (MetLife has been doing that here and rather aggressively).
Either way, the vacant rent-controlled apartments will mean that buildings will go sooner rather than later into market rates (aka, they will be decontrolled completely).
As I told my friend, I usually don't write about these things but, privately, I've predicted every single NYC real estate trend for the last 15 years. I am still kicking myself for not putting my foot down and getting into the Harlem market when I told my husband to do it (about 10 years ago).
I am usually wrong on a lot of things. I thought Argentina was going to win the world cup, for example. I also thought Superman was going to suck.
When it comes to trickle-down economics, I am unfortunately right. My time-frame prediction may not hit the mark, but mark my words, the market is going to explode with this one --and screw people like you and me in the process.
Eric Adams
Eric Adams will be pissed. He is all for cops and firefighters to live in the city because off-duty cops and firefighters are still, in many ways, benefitting the community.
residency requirements
The problem with this plan is that the City of New York needs to be keeping its money IN the city. If half the city's union employees move out to Long Island en masse, that is a lot of the city's money that is leaving the city and benefitting businesses and communities that are out of town.
I'd say that if such a plan as they are working on is approved, it needs to come with a provision that hiring and promoting will be strongly biased in favor of those who live in the city. That you can be a city employee and live on Long Island, but if you do, you must expect that if there are five people competing for a job or a contract, that the City will look first at the two people who are up for the job who live in the city, before even considering the two who live on Long Island and the one who lives in Westchester. The City government has every reason to what to encourage people who make their money off the government, off of the city's taxpayers, to spend that money in support of the city's businesses and communities.