MB Civic

To the Editor:

Re “Delusions of the Rich and Rent-Controlled” (column, June 3):

I’ll buy John Tierney’s contention that he and Nora Ephron should be paying a lot for deluxe apartments. But where the end of rent control destroys lives is when ordinary people on ordinary salaries are suddenly forced out of apartments they have lived in for decades — because the rent suddenly goes through the roof.

The apartments may be tiny, the super may be elusive, but with the help of the mayor, more and more landlords are pricing native New Yorkers right out of the city.

I do not weep for the landlords, and I do not consider this fair. We all become worse off as this becomes a city inhabited by only the amazingly rich and the amazingly poor.

As with the disappearance of the middle class across the country, it’s not a cause for celebration.

Judy Klass

New York, June 3, 2006

To the Editor:

Tell me, John Tierney, if you were an 83-year-old widow living on your Social Security in the same apartment, now rent-controlled, for 49 years, and the apartment became decontrolled, what would you do?

Would you move to a refrigerator box on the street? I don’t think so. Don’t fret. Time will eliminate rent control. Dorothy Greenberg

New York, June 4, 2006

To the Editor:

I have convinced myself that I am truly fair and impartial when I can agree with John Tierney.

Rent control is the entitlement of the upper-income classes that send their children to expensive private schools from pre-K through to the Ivy Leagues. The apartments become a tax-free inheritance.

Rent-regulated apartments should be subject to the strict income levels used by public housing for low-income and medium-income families. Tenants exceeding such guidelines should pay full market rents.

There is little hope of this happening, with screaming tenants showing up when the real estate board meets to review the guidelines.

If you look at the protesters, they are not the poor, elderly or disaffected but the articulate and politically sophisticated. Mr. Tierney, stay the course. I am with you.

Marian Dale

New York, June 3, 2006