Here is the article from the Jersey Journal, Wednesday, August 7, 2024:
Hoboken council reverses course on rent control deal with landlords, will likely head to voters in November
Measure will likely head to voters in November.
•Updated: Aug. 06, 2024, 4:59 p.m. |Published: Aug. 06, 2024, 4:28 p.m.
By Teri West | The Jersey Journal
After hours of public testimony, the Hoboken City Council sided with pro-tenant voices Monday night and voted down a deal it had struck with landlords that would have amended the city’s rent control ordinance.
The deal had represented the final means of preventing a November referendum on rent control, making it now all but certain that voters will have to decide whether to unravel a key tentpole of the law through a ballot question written by the Mile Square Taxpayers Association, a landlord interest group.
The council’s vote was unanimous and followed a warning from Mayor Ravi Bhalla that if the amendment the council had negotiated with the MSTA passed, he would veto it.
In voting, council members said they had heard tenants loud and clear, but they expressed trepidation, knowing that they were both surrendering control of the outcome and opening the floodgates to what could become a bitter, expensive election.
“I think some people are deluding themselves if they think this is going to be an easy victory, but I’m not here to scold anyone,” Councilman Jim Doyle said before declaring that he would side with the desires of the tenant advocates and vote “no.”
Earlier this year, the MSTA secured enough petition signatures to put a referendum on the ballot proposing that instead of being limited to the current 25% rent increase upon a unit’s vacancy, landlords of rent-controlled units should be able to increase rents as much as they want at that time as long as they pay $2500 to the city’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund.
The certification of the signatures last month started a 20-day clock for the council to try to head off the referendum through a deal with the MSTA. The deal they negotiated would have greatly increased the allowable size of a rent hike in between tenants, though it would have had limitations. Under it, after paying a fee, landlords would have been able to increase the rent by between 25% and 100%, depending on how long the most recent tenant had lived in the unit.
On Monday, more than 60 people spoke during what became a three-and-a-half hour virtual public hearing before the vote with the vast majority saying they were tenants themselves or were speaking in the interest of tenants.
The MSTA responded to the outcome by labeling the council as people operating under fear in the face of a “mob.”
“We empathize with them,” MSTA Executive Director Ron Simoncini wrote in six-paragraph statement. “It is difficult to face a mob. But moreover, we pity them. It’s clear that those council seats mean so much to them that they willing sacrificed their ethics and the health and equity in their city and prostrated themselves to unworthy values and tactics.”
To tenants who pleaded with the council to vote the deal down, it represented a perilous threat that would incentivize landlords to leverage their power to oust them, particularly those who had lived in their units the longest. While defeating the referendum will be a fight, they said, it is a fight that can be won and it is worth it because of how detrimental the alternative deal struck would be.
“Just like you can vote against this amendment, you can use your influence, your newsletters and your mailing list to get turnout against the referendum (that) you acknowledge is a bad deal and defeat it in November,” resident Anthony Spirito told the council.
The decision came from an often-divided council after the MSTA had backed it into a corner to the point of having to hold a special council meeting over Zoom following weeks when many of them had been on prescheduled vacations.
While earlier in the process many council members had seemed to favor approving a deal, believing it to be far preferable to a referendum, by the end of last week, council members both aligned with and opposed to the mayor had said they were undecided on how they would vote.
Some attributed their ultimate decision to the scale of the resident response.
“I don’t think I’ve ever gotten more feed back from people that live in the Fifth Ward than on this issue tonight,” Councilman Phil Cohen said.
Even as Councilmen Ruben Ramos announced his decision to vote “no,” he did so with the wary tone of a father sending a child off to college, first recounting all he had done to protect tenant’s interest before reaching this moment, and then reluctantly relinquishing authority.
“I am willing to give them what they’re requesting tonight, rejecting the compromise,” he said of tenants. “Hopefully they are successful in November.”