, the Puerto Rican restaurant they bought 40 years ago and still operate. She lives nearby in one of the four units in the second building, where she’s opening a bakery on the ground floor.
It was one of two measures the Newark City Council adopted on Aug. 2 after Mayor Ras J. Baraka’s administration proposed them. The ordinance cites a report from the Rutgers Law School Center on Law, Inequality and Metropolitan Equity, known asThe study found that rents rose by 66% in the 15 years before the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, nearly triple the 24% increase in household incomes during that time. It found that 45% of residents live in houses or small buildings with two to four apartments and that 78% of Newark residents are renters, more than.
Even so, she said the family wants to keep rents as low as possible — $1,500 a month for a 4-bedroom unit — and haven’t raised their rents since 2018. Villanueva said If small property owners can’t charge what they need to, they could be forced to sell out to less sympathetic investors who might raise rents by as much and as often as possible.
But with more than three-quarters of the city’s 311,000 residents renting their homes, and many of those in multi-family dwellings, McIver said rent control had to be expanded.