Albany, NY – Lawmakers Mull Rent Control Extension

Albany, NY – The New York legislature says it will take up the issue of New York City’s rent control law as the current three-year law is set to expire.

Lawmakers are expected to extend the rent-control and rent-regulation laws when they expire on June 15 in a move likely to infuriate landlords, the New York Post reported Sunday.

Of New York City’s 2 million rental units, 34,000 are rent controlled, with a further million covered by looser rent regulations.

Apartments currently fall out of rent control if their monthly rents hit $2,000 or if a tenants’ income hits $175,000 for two years in a row.

The New York Assembly is likely to set the monthly rent threshold at $3,000 and the tenant income threshold at $300,000, while the state Senate is considering lowering the rent cap to $1,500 a month and keeping the $175,000 income limit, which would bring more rental units into the open market.

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Three bedrooms, $76.13

98 Grattan St., Bushwick, Brooklyn

Ernesta Cortez-Salas owns the modest three-story Bushwick walkup (left) where first-floor resident Damisela Diaz, 39, shells out an unbelievable $76 a month for her home a short distance from an L-train stop that takes riders to Manhattan in 10 minutes.

Cortez-Salas, 62, said Diaz has no right to the eye-popping price, which hardly covers the apartment’s maintenance costs.

The widowed landlord has unsuccessfully tangled with the tenant in court since 2000.

The other units in the building cost more than 10 times Diaz’s rent.

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10-room mansion, $1,040

130 Kenilworth Place, Midwood, Brooklyn

On Kenilworth Place, a shabby chic Victorian-style home stands apart from smaller, boxy houses.

For a mere $1,040 a month, Bernard Haggerty, 39, lives in the rent-controlled Flatbush mansion with five bedrooms, a den, a living room, a kitchen, a dining room and a bathroom. The home’s owners would like to move in — but are stuck instead in an apartment next door.

The Wallach family has owned this palatial home for 61 years. Back in 1941, the monthly rent was $75.

In the late 1960s, landlord Lee Wallach wanted to evict tenant George Haggerty, his wife and his three sons and move in himself. But his request for owner occupancy was denied, and the Wallachs wound up living next door instead.

Haggerty’s grown sons moved out, and when he and his wife passed away, his son John Haggerty gained succession rights by claiming that he had been living in the house all along. In order to inherit the right, a tenant had to have been residing in the rental for the previous two years.

“I know it to be nonsense,” Wallach said. “I lived next door, but the rent office was not going to rule in the contrary and they said, ‘Yes, he’s always lived there.’ ”

To this day the house — around the corner from Brooklyn College and steps away from a Starbucks — is under rent control’s grip.

“The preamble of the federal law that gave us rent control on March 1, 1943, was that ‘due to the emergency of war’ — I guess they must have meant the war in, I don’t know where — Pakistan? Afghanistan? ‘Due to the emergency of war’ — they obviously must have predicted this 60 years ago — that rent control is necessary.”

The landlord believed that John Haggerty, the second-generation tenant, still lived in the enormous Brooklyn home — but The Post learned that he too passed away.

“I’m third-generation,” Bernard Haggerty said, as he walked up to the double wooden doors of his huge place.