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Rental Housing Can't Be Reserved for the Wealthy: New York Must Regulate the Application Process


Housing (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)


If Mayor Eric Adams wants to solve New York City's housing crisis, he must challenge some of the city's most powerful players: landlords. The absurd demands that landlords place on renters is one major part of New York City’s housing crisis that simply does not get enough attention. The standards many landlords use to confirm whether prospective tenants qualify for housing need massive reform and are often as much of a concern – and barrier – as rental prices.  

Ambiguous or absent laws governing the apartment application process are detrimental to New Yorkers and to solving the housing crisis. If most landlords continue to require a perfect financial profile and massive down payments for renters, there will always be a large population of New Yorkers unable to meet the demands of the application process. 

The unwritten rules for New York City's housing applications are in desperate need of regulation: landlords typically require tenants to make 40 times the rent, have a minimum credit score of 700, and provide upfront payments of first month's rent and a security deposit — while also paying an exorbitant broker fee that is pushed onto tenants by landlords.

Tenants typically need several thousand dollars upfront to rent an apartment, sometimes approaching what could be a down payment on homeownership. The paperwork required for renting an apartment is comparable to buying a home. Landlords demand an employment verification letter, recommendations from past landlords, three months of full bank statements, a year or more of tax returns, three pay stubs, among a list of other documents. The current housing application process is unsuitable to lower-income New Yorkers because they usually lack the documents and resources to compete with a wealthier applicant’s financial profile.

As long as tenants continue to jump through hoops to obey property owners' demands and legislation doesn’t help minimize invasive requirements and protect tenants' privacy, landlords will continue to have no incentive to stop considering working and lower-class New Yorkers a threat to their status quo.

The average rent in New York City is about $3,000 per month. Using landlords’ 40 times the rent income standard, New Yorkers need to make about $120,000 per year to qualify for average rental housing. Obviously, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers’ don’t earn that much — the 2020 Census reported the median household income in New York City at $67,046. Income requirements prohibit an enormous population from participating in the whole rental housing market, even when they can afford it. With high income and extensive documentation requirements put in place by so many landlords, it is impossible for many New Yorkers to not feel pushed out of most of the rental market. 

Wealthier applicants exclusively benefit from the current housing rental application process and many hardworking New Yorkers and seniors don’t get the decent housing they need and deserve. Landlords are seemingly looking to find ways to discourage lower-income tenants from applying for housing and for reasons to reject them if they do — the application requirements for many apartments are nearly impossible for lower-income residents to meet. It becomes disturbingly worse once you factor in the high broker fees that are pushed on to tenants.

Broker fees in New York City are typically 15% of the annual rent, which means tenants must fork over several thousand dollars on top of the first month's rent and security deposit. Landlords hire real estate brokers to aid their rental process, yet they somehow evade the price of this service and make the tenant responsible for the bill.

In 2020 legislation was enacted that protected tenants from being responsible for the landlords’ broker fees. But, after the efforts of a powerful real estate lobbying group, the decision was quickly reversed the following year. The brokers do the leg work for the landlords, often listing the property, filtering through applicants, showcasing the property, collecting fees, and essentially ensuring that there is a smooth application and leasing process for the landlord and tenant. Yes, it is true that brokers need to be paid for their work, but the question is, should the tenant be responsible? 

To expand access to housing, reduce homelessness, and create a new standard of living for many New Yorkers, new rental application regulations must be established. This includes laws prohibiting property owners from charging tenants for their broker fees, laws related to preventing the disqualification of tenants based on their financial profile, and laws to limit how much landlords can require from tenants.

Additionally, New York should examine its affordable housing policies and increase eligibility for income-restricted housing to mostly benefit long-time residents of the community where new housing is built. This would require increasing the 50% threshold for community district residents in affordable housing lotteries and increasing the length of time that a resident must live in New York City to be eligible for affordable housing.

Meanwhile, the development of new affordable housing is often prolonged and dysfunctional, and officials are simply not ensuring we are building anywhere near enough of it.

But while more needs to be done on affordable housing development and the lottery process, it is essential that New York leaders take steps as soon as possible to regulate the tenant application process.

Smart and fair regulations will transform the New York City housing market by creating more opportunity for lower-income New Yorkers to qualify for quality housing. As Mayor Adams pursues more housing development on a large scale, he must be willing to sacrifice some of his popularity with developers and property owners by making the rental market fairer by removing income restrictions set by landlords and abolishing the precedent that landlords’ broker fees are the tenant’s responsibility. And the City Council should work with him or take the lead on this effort to create a fairer housing market.

New York City apartments are in high demand and rental prices reflect the market, but New Yorkers are being excluded from much of that market even when they can afford the rent. It’s time for that to change.  It is time for the Mayor, New York City Council, Governor, and State Legislature to take this on in 2023.

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Khiteriara Brown is the Founder and Director of Millennial Channel. Khiteriara is a xenophile, world affairs commentator, and philanthropist. She has a master’s in Chinese translation from New York University, a master’s in political management from George Washington University, and a bachelor’s in history from the University of Alabama. On Twitter @millennialchannl

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The Danger of Downplaying AAPI Bigotry


City Council Member Sandra Ung, the author


During a New York City Council hearing last month, a person affiliated with a local nonprofit group stated that Asians aren’t real New Yorkers, saying “it’s not their neighborhood, because they’re from China, they’re from Hong Kong. We’re from New York.”

While this incident has largely disappeared from the public discourse, it brought to the surface a pernicious stereotype about Asian New Yorkers as we come off another year when hate crimes against the AAPI community continue to be a far-too-common occurrence.

Like many immigrants, my family came to the United States after escaping tragedy. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge began persecuting and killing thousands of people during what would be known as the Cambodian genocide. The government eventually murdered or disappeared nearly 300,000 Chinese Cambodians, including my mother’s sisters and parents. 

The United States took us in and we became proud Americans. We rebuilt our lives in New York City and have called Queens home ever since. I was educated in American schools, grew up around other American kids and culture, and always thought of myself as American. Like many AAPIs, this is the only home that I know.  

Despite the welcome and our deep roots here, there was an uglier side to growing up in America as an Asian immigrant. Throughout my childhood, I often received one of two common pieces of “advice”: that I should learn English and that I should go back to my own country. And despite attending school here for most of my life, graduating from Columbia Law School and working for Congress, individuals continue to “compliment” me on how well I speak English.

When statements like these were made, very rarely did anyone denounce them or start a discussion about how they affected me. I just accepted it as part of growing up an immigrant — an Asian American immigrant — in the United States.

Words like these and those said in Council Chambers have real consequences. Casting Asian Americans as foreigners rationalizes the continued treatment of Asians as belonging to a nebulous group of outsiders who don’t have the same rights or value as other Americans. Like Islamophobia, homophobia, or anti-Black racism, this “othering” serves as a tool to legitimize both exclusion and violence.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, I began to realize that my experiences with racism weren’t just part of growing up an immigrant in America, it was part of a larger issue that prejudice against the AAPI community is not only overlooked, but in too many instances tolerated. 

While perusing soda bottles in a store one day, a woman began screaming at me to stop touching everything because the virus came from me. Her visceral anger stemmed from the belief that I was spreading covid because I was Asian. I looked around for help because I was worried I was about to be physically attacked, but as usual there wasn’t any help to be found. 

This isn’t a new threat for Asian Americans.

While the recent rise in hatred targeting Asians may be attributable to a president who threw around words like “kung flu” and the “China virus,” attempts to cast Asians as foreign is an age-old trope repeatedly utilized in attempts to justify both violence and racist government policies. The pandemic bigotry and the recent rise in violence is just the newest incarnation of a form of racism that has pervaded the United States since its founding.

When an economic downturn tightened the labor market in the 1870s, many political figures and the press scapegoated Asians, who they claimed were unassimilable. Asian workers were blamed for putting downward pressure on wages for white workers. Efforts to brand Asians as foreigners culminated in the 1885 Rock Springs massacre, when at least 28 Chinese miners were murdered. 

The same trope was rolled out shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when the United States began forcibly relocating people of Japanese descent into concentration camps. Approximately 80,000 of those interned were actually second or third generation Americans with U.S. citizenship.

Fast-forward to 1982 in Detroit, where Vincent Chin, an American of Chinese descent, was beaten to death by two men motivated by anti-Japanese sentiment caused by the decline of the auto industry. His killers received three years’ probation and a $3,000 fine. 

Chin wasn’t seen as an American citizen or an individual, he was a foreigner to be blamed for the ills of this country. As in the murders of Asian Americans in the 1800s, Chin’s killers were essentially excused for their actions.

For Asian Americans, insinuations and outright accusations of being foreigners aren’t just words. We are too often not viewed as equal citizens of this country, so people feel justified setting fire to an elderly AAPI woman, pushing an Asian American woman from a subway platform, or entering City Hall and delivering bigoted remarks.

After the incident before the City Council, some tried to explain away the comments by stating the person who delivered them was reacting to his own history with racism. Once again, many in the AAPI community felt like our pain was being ignored; that our rights and freedoms as American citizens are conditional and that this will never be our home.

As we enter a new year, it is my hope that the conversations around the AAPI community aren’t centered on whether or not we belong here, but rather our indispensable role in this great city.

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City Council Member Sandra Ung represents parts of Queens. On Twitter @CMSandraUng.

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People and Places are Key to New York City’s More Livable, Prosperous Future


New park investments (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)


New York took a big step forward last month when Governor Hochul and Mayor Adams released Making New York Work for Everyone, a plan with 40 commitments meant to steer New York City toward economic growth and livability. The report sets goals and policies for reinvigorating the city’s commercial corridors and fostering vibrancy by addressing commute times, housing, public space, outdoor dining, and more. But even more promising than the individual commitments is the clear acknowledgement that people-centered policy and placemaking is at the heart of New York City’s future.

As members of the Alliance for Public Space Leadership, we’ve been advocating for this exact progress. Our public spaces — parks, plazas, streets, sidewalks — are the lifeblood of this city. But great public spaces have too often been reserved for wealthier neighborhoods, and haven’t been prioritized as essential pieces of a healthy and thriving city for all.

As a coalition, we want government leaders to understand that these public spaces need central investment in the same way as other public services. Currently, there is no holistic management or investment in New York’s public space. Every Open Street, block party, or neighborhood safety initiative is the product of intense volunteer effort, organization, and coordination. It’s inequitable, exclusionary, and burdensome. And within government, city agencies and departments are too often working in isolation. They can’t focus on collaborative problem-solving because our government structure doesn’t allow for it.

That’s why the new report is so promising. For the first time, New York City is acknowledging the need for structural and holistic leadership with a new Director of the Public Realm. This central decision-maker can help envision the city’s public spaces as part of a larger ecosystem — one that impacts physical health, mental wellbeing, sense of community, economic success, and climate resilience.

Our Director of the Public Realm should provide communities with the resources they need to cultivate Open Streets and other street activations, prioritize equitable access to public space in underserved neighborhoods, and provide design leadership to ensure our public space is high-quality and sustainable. This is our chance to build New York City’s first overarching vision for public space.

The 59 ‘New’ New York panelists who wrote this report (and we were glad to meet with during their research phase) have recognized that economic growth doesn’t happen in a bubble. Commerce is connected with place and people, as the recent Streetscapes for Wellness and Streets for Recovery reports have shown. When New Yorkers have safe, reliable, and joyful space in their neighborhoods, they support local business. When curb lanes are used for things other than car storage, bus commutes get shorter and neighborhoods become more livable. When we give communities the tools to build inclusive, communal space in their neighborhoods, everyone benefits.

These aren’t just nice ideas, they’re proven solutions to a better future.

New York City has made a bold step here, but there’s still a long road ahead. We will need everyone’s support and commitment in fulfilling the 40 goals in this report and moving beyond pandemic recovery into a bright, thriving, and equitable future. 

Our alliance has joined forces to advocate for shared space and shared goals; we’ve found strength in our numbers. Now, New York City’s leaders at all three levels of government must do the same. To reimagine New York’s business districts — and every district — as vibrant, 24/7 destinations, we’ll need local officials to prioritize people over cars. We’ll need leaders with vision who will catalyze a new future, not a return to the way things were. The siloed status quo is harmful to the wellbeing of our city’s residents, particularly those in underserved communities. It isolates public space in wealthier communities, strips New Yorkers of their ability to create inclusive spaces, and creates dangerous street conditions where thriving public space could be. We must move beyond that. We must think cooperatively about our shared spaces to arrive at shared solutions.

As an alliance, we’re committed to pushing the city forward, helping to illuminate the possibilities and solutions for a brighter future. We’re energized to see the Adams administration commit to do the same. We’re looking forward to working with the city’s first Director of the Public Realm, and all our decision-makers, on the exciting road ahead.

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Elizabeth Goldstein, President, The Municipal Art Society of New York. @MASNYC
Jackson Chabot, Director of Advocacy and Organization, Open Plans. @OpenPlans
Benjamin Prosky, Executive Director, American Institute of Architects (AIA) New York. @AIA_NewYork
Adam Ganser, Executive Director, New Yorkers for Parks. @NY4P

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