The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [28]
Rent control, though it protected many poor people, also became another ripoff for the privileged. Taxpayers, for instance, help subsidize Mayor Koch’s $250-a-month, three-room Greenwich Village apartment; its fair market value, says a spokesman for Koch’s landlord, New York University, would be $400 to $450. If Koch and some of his neighbors paid a market rent, the building would be assessed at a higher rate, which would mean more revenues to the landlord and more real estate taxes to the city.
Arthur Levitt, Jr., president of the American Stock Exchange and son of the tight-fisted state comptroller, also benefits from rent control. He pays $661 a month for an eight-room, high-ceilinged apartment, with a wood-burning fireplace, on East 86th Street. A fair market rental, says his landlord, would be $850 to $1,200 a month. The Stock Exchange president, who is active in the chorus demanding business tax reductions, stumbled when I asked him to justify his cozy rent. “Let me think about that a moment, and exactly how I want to answer it,” he said. “I hate to give you a ‘no comment.’ ” Then, after a long pause: “I pay more rent than half the tenants in the building.” He admitted that the rent was low but said it was “close to market value.” Three times in the last fifteen years, he said, he had voluntarily agreed to hike the rent above the sum required, as his landlord concedes. But he admitted, “It’s not unfair to say that the building is underassessed.”
Dean Alfange, a former American Labor party candidate for governor in 1942 (now a benefactor of horse racing and the state Liberal party), keeps a five-room apartment with a sweeping view on Central Park West in the Sixties. He pays $373 a month. The same apartment, one floor below, rents for $650. It is not controlled. The good doctor on Alfange’s floor also has a controlled apartment. He pays $418 for six rooms overlooking the park, complete with a nice 14½-by-23-foot living room.
Former opera singer and actress Dorothy Sarnoff (she appeared in the original King and I) doesn’t have a view, but for the last twenty-four years she has had a rent-controlled apartment on plush Central Park South. Mrs. Sarnoff now operates a thriving speech instruction clinic, charging $1,500 for six hours and $2,500 per lecture. Her rent is $470 a month for an apartment said to be worth $750. Reached in Washington, where she was instructing State Department officials, Mrs. Sarnoff claimed she was paying “a fair rent.” Besides, she wondered, “If rents go higher and higher, where does the middle class go?” When pressed, she admitted she was not a member of that class.
Nor is Nat Sherman. His Fifth Avenue tobacco store rents for $210,000 a year and produces hand-rolled cigars and gold-tipped cigarettes; custom-made pipes sell for as much as $800. The monthly rent for his six-room Central Park West apartment is $355. For thirty-five years he has enjoyed the same apartment, though he admits to spending five or six months each year basking in Florida’s sunshine. Is this a fair rent? His response: “It happens to be used so little that I think it’s fair. I paid my dues in the early days. If my landlord doesn’t make money, I’ll be glad to pay the difference … I wish you wouldn’t quote me in that area.”
For the last thirty-three years, Mrs. Otto Fuerst has lived in the same Central Park South building as Mrs. Sarnoff. Her two-bedroom apartment rents for $440. The rent control law requires that an apartment serve as a “primary” residence,