Falling Rents Still Aren't Low Enough For Some

[90sSitcom]

Originally Posted by mathjak107

A free month lowers the effective rent but it does not lower the base rent for stabilization purposes

Exactly. I moved into an apartment in 2010. I got a free month and a free gym membership in the building due to the economy still recovering. Then when the lease was up. It was raised based upon the original rent. No more free month or free gym membership on the renewal.
I did try to negotiate. But they said the current housing market didn't warrant any incentives any more.

[mathjak107]

With stabilized apartments they used to be able to drop the rent in tough times .. then if things got better they can raise it the following year not only back to what it was lowered from but plus any stabization board increases for that year .

New laws say once lowered you can not raise it back ..all you get is the stabilized increase and that’s it

[dfc99]

What that study showed is something myself and others have said for ages; NYC needs tons of "low income" housing. More importantly those people are looking for one or two bedroom apartments that are cheap, not just studios.

Those days are gone. Land and labor is too expensive everywhere in NYC to profitably build apartments for the middle-class, so forget about low income units. I grew up in Kensington, Brooklyn on a side street near Ocean Parkway. My parents owned a 2-family home but the neighborhood was mostly apartment buildings. In the 1960s many nice new 6-story elevator buildings for middle-class renters went up, mostly along Ocean Parkway. These were nice buildings with proper lobbies, many even had garages. The economics to construct such buildings doesn't exist today. It only pays for a developer to put up buildings for the upper middle class or the wealthy.

[foxyknoxy]

Some buildings offering 4 months free rent