Over a half-melted peanut-butter açai bowl at a picnic table in the Bronx’s Pelham Bay neighborhood, Kenny Burgos explains why rents for nearly a million apartments in New York need to go up. “The Bronx, to this day, has buildings that are almost 100 percent — if not 100 percent — regulated,” he says, his gaze unblinking. “And those are the buildings that are struggling the most, that have the highest violation counts.” He’s making the case that, as things stand with our current housing laws, keeping apartments in those buildings habitable means tenants will have to pay more.
The 31-year-old former assemblyman and CEO of the New York Apartment Association — a group whose members include property owners and managers of some 500,000 rent-stabilized apartments — knows it’s an unpopular opinion, especially in a city where the majority of people rent. And it’s especially unpopular now, since the mayor, another former assemblyman in his 30s, was elected on a promise to freeze the rents on those very apartments. “I do this work because I know I’m right,” Burgos says. “And I know that we are on a path to destroy the housing people live in.”
