Our landlord at Tracey Towers has notified tenants that the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) has received its application for a rent increase to go into effect in three stages over the next two years. The percentage requested for July 2011 is 25.53; for July 2012 it is 20.34; for July 2013 it is 16.9. When the math is done, we tenants will have our rents increased by a whopping 77 percent in the next two years.

Tracey Towers is a Mitchell-Lama complex where tenants moved in with the promise that rents would remain affordable. If these rent increases go through as requested that will no longer be the case. The whole Mitchell-Lama concept will be destroyed, and increasing numbers of dislocations will result as tenants get evicted due to non-payment of rents they can no longer afford.

In these harsh economic times, especially harsh for our working middle class and fixed-income seniors, such a draconian rent increase is unconscionable. The destruction of our nation’s middle class has finally reached Tracey Towers where seniors, who will be hit especially hard, will have to decide whether to pay rent or buy food and prescription medicines.

What makes this current rent increase request even more egregious is the fact that the New York City Rent Guidelines Board never approves increases above 10 percent for those living in rent-stabilized apartments, those whose incomes would enable them to pay even more. So, why such an exorbitant request for a rent increase here at Tracey Towers?  We can only conclude that it is the result of the class war being waged all across America against the middle class. HPD has our fate in their hands, which may mean we are doomed.

Sam Gillian
The writer is vice president of the Tracey Towers Tenant Organization.