AOC Gives NY Rent Reform A Boost At Bronx Town Hall: 'We All Have A Right To Dignified Housing'

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lent her star power to the New York state campaign for rent reform at a Bronx Town Hall Thursday night, speaking to an enthralled crowd in the pivotal waning weeks before the state legislature is expected to vote on a series of tenant protection proposals that housing activists have fought to pass for two decades.

“Our access and our guarantee to having a home comes before someone’s privilege to own a property,” Ocasio-Cortez told a group of more than 200 housing activists and tenants who packed into a small banquet hall on Allerton Avenue during a soggy evening. “We all have a right to dignified housing.”

At one point, the Congresswoman, whose district includes sections of the Bronx, spoke of her own experience of renting a so-called “luxury” doorman apartment in Washington D.C., which was in part necessitated by security concerns. “It’s efficient, clean. It has public space,” she said about her building.

But she said she recently toured an affordable housing development in Queens that had the same “luxury” features.

“What that shows me is that what we have been taught is a luxury should not be a luxury,” she said. “We don’t have to be price-gouged to live in a building with cockroaches and dirty air."

Ocasio-Cortez, who headlined the event, was joined by New York state Senators Jamaal Bailey and Alessandra Biaggi and Assemblywoman Nathalia Fernandez. Throughout the evening, housing activists used the forum to pressure the three state lawmakers to commit to reform legislation.

At stake are a package of nine bills around a platform known as universal rent control. Tenant organizers are aggressively lobbying for the passage of all nine proposals, including the end of vacancy decontrol, which allows landlords to deregulate apartments once they become vacant and monthly rents surpass $2,733, and the elimination of renovation incentive policies known as major capital improvements (MCIs) and individual apartment upgrades (IAIs).

But with only 15 days to go before the current rent laws expire, the Assembly has embraced eight of the proposals, while the Senate has not publicly specified which of the bills they favor.

“We’re two weeks out and there are not enough clear signals,” Ava Farkas, executive director of the Metropolitan Council on Housing, a tenant advocacy group, told Gothamist.

Adding to the anxiety by housing activists, on Thursday NY1 reported an unnamed source as saying that only three of the bills had sufficient support from Senate Democrats.

State senators Biaggi and Bailey, whose districts includes portions of the Bronx, have both come out in favor of all nine bills. But they defended their Democratic colleagues in the Senate, saying there were still having conversations. One of the obstacles, they said, was that many of senators represent districts that don't have the same affordable housing issues as New York City.

“Not everyone is going to agree on every single thing,” Biaggi said. “That’s just the reality.”

She later added: “There is not a person in [the Democratic conference] that has said water down this bill. That is not the sentiment in that room at all.”

The fervor for reform among housing activists was almost equally matched by their scorn for Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has over the years cultivated a long list of real estate donors and drawn suspicion that he will cater to those interests.

“Do not trust Governor Cuomo,” Farkas told the state lawmakers. “In past years, he didn’t do anything for us.”

In what may be a game of brinksmanship, a coalition of about 30 progressive advocacy groups last week signed a letter urging Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie to cut the governor out of negotiations and force his hand by delivering a package approved by the legislature.

According to activists, a refusal by Cuomo to sign the bills would amount to political suicide.

However, when asked about the activists’ demands during The Brian Lehrer Show on Tuesday, Cuomo snapped, “Then I won’t sign the package and you won’t have any rent reform laws.”

State senator Bailey said the reality was that the governor needed to sign the legislation, but when asked how Democrats would prevent him from weakening the bills, he replied, “I am not in the executive branch.”

Despite concerns about New York City’s powerful real estate industry, which in recent months has been scrambling to shape the legislation, Ocasio-Cortez tried to buoy the crowd.

Citing her own upset primary election victory last year in which she was vastly outspent by her Democratic opponent, she said, “Our organizing can beat big money."