A ‘greed’ double standard
It turns out Mayor de Blasio isn’t such a big fan of the Golden Rule: Even as he’s engineered a rent freeze for tenants covered by rent-stabilization laws, he’s been upping what he charges his own tenants.
Politico reports that the de Blasios have raised the rent of one two-family Park Slope unit in $50 and $75 increments since 2009. Another unit saw a $25 jump in 2015.
Of course, the city Rent Guidelines Board doesn’t control leases for buildings with so few units, nor for the de Blasio family home, which the mayor let out for $4,500 a month after he moved to Gracie Mansion.
So Hizzoner is fully within his legal rights — but it’s hard to figure out a moral standard that justifies his regular hikes, even as he orders zero increases for others.
The mayor picks all nine members of the rent board, and has made no bones about ordering up a freeze. He has said, “I instructed the Rent Guidelines Board . . . not to follow the biases of the past” and taken credit for the freeze in political literature.
When a legal challenge to the freeze got struck down last month, de Blasio gloated to a Washington Heights crowd: “The court put tenants’ needs ahead of the landlords’ greed.”
But his own “greed” is apparently OK — even though everyone expects the board to order a continued freeze in June.
Which will feature loudly in his re-election campaign.
Of course, this isn’t the only area where the mayor’s pocketbook trumps his principles: He’s also pointedly not offering to spend his own cash to cover his legal fees from the recent corruption investigations.
Instead, de Blasio’s talking about having the City Council change the law to vastly up the legal limit on donations to his legal-defense fund.
The next time the mayor waxes moralistic, keep in mind that he’s talking about enforcing virtue for other folks — not himself.