Rent Stabilization Helped My Jewish Family
by Jewish Community Action member Sandy Gerber
Jews and rent control go together like the proverbial horse and carriage, at least for the generations of Jews who had the great good fortune to live in New York City in the 1950s and 60s, when rent control was a major policy prevailing in the rental market. My immediate and extended family were beneficiaries of that policy and will be forever grateful for it.
My family of four lived in a four-room apartment on the sixth floor of an apartment building in a densely populated, overwhelmingly Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx. My maternal grandparents lived on the third floor, and my great-grandmother and great-aunt and –uncle lived a few blocks down the street. Extended family members resided in similar neighborhoods throughout the Bronx and Brooklyn, and nearly all lived in rent-controlled apartments. We never placed ourselves within the vocabulary of transiency we hear today about renters. This was our home; this was our neighborhood, our “village;” and we were there for the long-term.
Heavily represented in these neighborhoods were immigrants, Holocaust survivors, and working-class families who could not have financially survived without a sure-fire cap on the amount of rent they paid.
My father, who had dropped out of high school to help support his family during the Great Depression and was a combat veteran in World War II, labored in a small luncheonette (a peculiarly New York City institution), earning enough to provide us with kosher meat, school clothes (bought wholesale, from our great-aunt’s shop), and a car. We had no margin for raises in rent.
The stability in our housing enabled me to concentrate on my studies, graduate from high school, and attend the free-tuition City College of New York, ultimately becoming the first college graduate in my immediate family. My grandfather worked in a factory that made women’s purses; he was able to confidently retire on a union pension and social security, having lived for forty years in an apartment that required a monthly rent payment of $60.
When my parents moved to Queens, New York in the 1980s, rent control had morphed into rent stabilization. This meant that households couldn’t rely on the rent remaining the same amount over the years; instead there was a capped percentage raise every two years, in the vicinity of 2–3%. Even though regular rent raises were more difficult financially than a fixed rent, the capped percentage and consistent time frame provided reliability.
The stable housing situation my family and neighbors enjoyed was not an anomaly during that historical period. It was a time of social policy in New York City that addressed certain pressing economic needs of working-class, mostly white people, including many Ashkenazi Jews.
However, the severe racial disparities we see today were even more prevalent during that period, fraught with intractable housing segregation and discrimination against people of color. But large numbers of Ashkenazi Jews — including my family and me — found a ticket to the middle-class, being beneficiaries of the enlightened policies of rent control and rent stabilization.
