Last night was a difficult vote, but now that it has been made, the next one is easy.
Last night, I led ALL of my city council colleagues in voting ‘No’ for the ordinance that would weaken our rent control laws, leaving it up to the voters to decide in November.
In November, I will vote 'No' again in order to 'Save Rent Control in Hoboken'. And I will help the “Save Rent Control” campaign to get the vote out for this important election to save the soul of Hoboken.
As a reminder about what is on the ballot:
- VOTING NO: Keeping our rent control protections in place.
- VOTING YES: Allowing current rents to be repriced upward to market prices when the unit becomes vacant.
Importantly, if the referendum passes, the City Council would not be able to make any changes for three years. But if it fails, we can amend our ordinance again. My recommended amendments would help landlords who reduced rents during COVID or for other benevolent reasons to get back up to pre-reduction levels upon vacancy and include measures that better protect tenants from unlawful evictions.
But we can ONLY do this if you vote 'No' in November.
Last night, almost 200 people joined the Zoom City Council meeting, and ~65 people spoke about the ordinance that the City Council would be voting on, with about 10 supporting the ordinance. About a 2/3 of the speakers on both sides of the discussion live in Hoboken, including Rent Control advocates and landlords. I learned something from every speaker. Another amazing example of how
#MOREVOICESAREALWAYSBETTER.
A specific shout-out to Hoboken’s own April Harris who spoke last night. She has been in Hoboken for decades, fighting for those who need it the most. Her words resonated the most with me as a City Council person who struggled with my vote last night. She reminded the audience that in 2012, in a presidential election with 16,000 voters, and even though there were 2:1 tenants to landlords, the rent control ballot question failed by only 100 votes. And I have heard that there may have been some fiddling to make this result happen.
100 votes.
That statistic is what I knew going into last night. If the results from the last time Rent Control was on the ballot – a close to 50/50 percent chance of losing - were any indication of the real risk in this election, that was not a risk I wanted to take to gut our rent protections, displace our long-term residents, and make Hoboken immediately unaffordable to most. That statistic is why I fought against amending our ordinance in 2023 – a vote, along with the subsequent Mayor’s veto of a compromise, that directly led to the risk of losing rent control protections that our community now faces. Last night, after all Council members spoke in unison about the difficulty of the vote and how appreciative we were to work together on this issue, CW Jabbour pivoted to suggest that had we all worked together and voted similarly in favor of her 2023 ordinance, none of this would have happened. FFS...she could not be more wrong.
The community overwhelmingly said last night and in the multitude of emails I received from Hoboken residents, that given the choice, WE WANT TO FIGHT TO SAVE RENT CONTROL. And I plan to fight right alongside them. Like I always have, and I always will.
As always, please share this with everyone you know who may be interested and reach out any time on any issue important to you: 201-208-1764 or [email protected].
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