BY AUDREY SMALTZ | I moved into my apartment at 15 W. 55th St. in 1977. That building has been my home and its tenants have been my neighbors for more than 35 years. For most of those years, everyone in the building knew one another and there was a genuine sense of safety and community.
Now, things have started to change. My friends and neighbors are being replaced by strangers and tourists thanks to booking Web sites like Airbnb and others that allow people to rent out their apartments. Of the 37 apartments in my building, only seven are currently inhabited by rent-stabilized tenants. The entire fourth floor is short-term rentals, as are many units on the third and the eighth floors.
Apartments in our building are blatantly advertised on booking.com and hotels.com, and it is not clear to guests who book rooms here (online, our building is known as “The Branson”) that they will not be staying in a legitimate hotel.
This makes for a lot of tension between guests and tenants. This was described in more detail last month in an article about the building, “The city’s worst ‘illegal’ hotel,” in Crain’s New York Business.
We do not want to live in a busy hotel. We are all senior citizens and want to live in the same safe, peaceful building we have always called home.
Not only have we lost our sense of safety, but the landlord has chosen to ignore our requests for necessary repairs. Instead, they are doing extensive renovations to make the vacant apartments more appealing to short-term tenants.
This is a continuation of a pattern that has been going on for a very long time. Apartments in our building have been warehoused for years, all in an effort to take the units out of rent stabilization.
Sites like Airbnb simply give unscrupulous landlords another incentive to remove affordable units from the market and monetize them for the benefit of tourists, not New York City residents.
And it’s a lucrative business. According to Crain’s, an 11-night stay in one of this building’s three-bedroom apartments in May 2014, for example, cost $9,121, or $276 per bedroom per night.
Though the illegal hotel business here is finally slowing down — no doubt due to the major lawsuit brought against this building by the city — the renovated units are currently rented out to college students who are in the city for an internship and will be gone in a few months.
Not long ago, one of the tourists staying in my building wandered onto my terrace. It was a terribly frightening experience that made me realize just how vulnerable a position my landlord has put me in by choosing profit over safety and community.
I hope my story has helped you all to see that short-term rentals do nothing but harm to the communities that New Yorkers like my neighbors and I spent years working to build.
