Is Lack Of "Diversity" At Big Law Firms A Crisis?

The leading trade magazine for the big law firm industry is called The American Lawyer.  This month, they devote most of a full issue to what they call "The Diversity Crisis."  As they define the term, the "diversity crisis" consists of the under-representation of African Americans in the ranks of big firm lawyers, the even greater under-representation of African Americans in the ranks of big firm partners, and the still greater under-representation of African Americans in the ranks of the top partners identified by The American Lawyer itself as handling the largest and most important transactions and litigations.  The cover illustration has photographs of some 131 top attorneys identified as "[leading] big law's top deals and suits"; just three are black.  (One of those is a partner of Willkie Farr.) 

There are no fewer than four feature articles on the subject, covering some 22 pages, plus an intro called "About Our Cover" and an editorial called "Time To Call It Racism?"  Guilt pervades.  Law firms are said to be "lagg[ing]" in matters of diversity, and their record is called "bleak."  Charts show the percentage of African Americans at big law firms dropping from 3.2% in 2004 to 3.0% in 2013, while the percentage among partners increased over the same period, but only from 1.7% to 1.9%.  Numerous prominent firms are listed as having not one single black partner.  Is this a major problem?

Well, it seems to me that there is a gigantic elephant in the room that one must deal with in order to discuss this issue intelligently.  That elephant is that fact that, while African Americans may well be under-represented at the top ranks of the American legal profession, there is one small ethnic group that is hugely, hugely over-represented.  That over-represented group, of course, is Jews.  The over-representation of Jews is so large that, inherently, all other ethnic groups must be under-represented, which in fact they are.  Some groups are more under-represented than others.  It is not at all clear to me that African Americans are the most under-represented among the remaining groups, nor does The American Lawyer even address that subject.

According to data here from the Jewish Virtual Library, in 2012 there were 6,671,680 Jews in the United States,constituting 2.1% of the population.  What is the percentage of Jews among the partners of the top law firms in the country?  In an hour of internet searching, I can't find anyone who has collected current data, but I am here in the middle of this industry.  Among partners of the top law firms in New York, I estimate that at least  25% are Jews.  And then we have an entire phenomenon here of what once were called the Jewish firms, many of them now at the very top of the profession -- Wachtell Lipton, Skadden Arps, Weil Gotshal, Paul Weiss, Fried Frank, Proskauer, Kramer Levin, Schulte Roth, Stroock, Kaye Scholer, and I could go on.  The percentage of Jews among partners at these firms has declined some in recent years, but I would estimate still well exceeds 25% in all cases, and is up to half in some.  And at the very top of these firms, running the place, it's still higher.  So, American Lawyer, is this a problem?

If you are unfamiliar with the history of Jews in top New York law firms, it is a very fascinating story.  Jews immigrated to the U.S. in large numbers in the first half of the twentieth century, concentrated in New York, and after World War II they began flooding into the legal profession.  But the large and prominent law firms at the top of the profession very overtly discriminated against the Jews, in a way that no one would dare to discriminate against any ethnic group today.   A 2006 article in the New York Law Journal (no longer available online but extensively quoted at jewlicious.com here) has the following story:

Ezra G. Levin, co-chair of Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel recalled that a classmate of his from Columbia Law School interviewed at a white-shoe firm in the late 1950s. “It wasn’t possible to tell from the candidate’s name whether he was Jewish or not,” said Mr. Levin. The interviewing partner led the candidate into a conference room festooned with the seals of Ivy League universities and pointed to Yale’s insignia, which bears a Hebrew inscription. “The partner wanted to know if he could read it,” said Mr. Levin.

A now-retired partner of mine, himself a top graduate of Harvard Law School in the early 60s but not Jewish, told many similar stories about the very smartest people in his class, who were Jewish, getting turned away from all the top firms, with the firms being completely explicit in their refusal to hire Jews.

But somehow it seems that the prospective Jewish lawyers just were well-suited to their chosen profession and found another way around the problem.  The linked NYLJ article contains some almost unbelievable statistics: By 1960 "Jewish lawyers actually comprised 60 percent of the city’s bar membership."  But, since many of the large firms excluded them, "these lawyers were overwhelmingly found in solo practices or small firms."    Many of the now-powerhouse Jewish firms were founded in this period of the 1950s and 60s, and started to grow and take the most profitable business away from their establishment competitors.  By the 1970s, all firms were hiring Jews in large numbers.  From the 2006 NYLJ article:

[Eli] Wald . . . points out that Jewish lawyers perversely benefited from what he calls “the flip side of bias.” He notes that the white-shoe ethos of the first half of the 20th century rejected most Jewish lawyers based on stereotypes of their being aggressive and money-grubbing. By the late 1960s, however, being aggressive and “maximizing profits” have become virtues at large firms, and Mr. Wald says he thinks Jewish lawyers were then able to benefit from the negative stereotype.

And of course, it is a necessary consequence of the great over-representation of Jews in our trade that all other ethnic groups are under-represented.  Because a group that is only 2% of the population occupies something like 25% or more of the top law partnerships, that means that white protestants are under-represented by close to 25% as against their share of the population, and white Catholics (such as yours truly) are under-represented by even more.  Asians?  According to Wikipedia they are now 4.8% of the population, and according to The American Lawyer they are about 6% of big law firm associates and 1.6% of partners.  Is this discrimination, reverse discrimination, or just what happens as people seek work that suits them?  And then there are ethnic groups that have virtually no representation at all in these big firm partnerships.  Middle-Eastern muslims come to mind.

Here's my favorite paragraph from the whole American Lawyer guilt-fest:  Buried as a "P.S." at the end of the "About Our Cover" intro, we have this unbelievable admission:

P.S.: For those of us who cover Big Law, we must do better too. ALM  [American Lawyer Media] has no blacks among the senior leaders of its national publications, including The American Lawyer. And less than 1 percent of our reporters are black.

Well, has anybody considered the possibility that blacks have just found something they prefer doing with their time?  I don't know why Jews occupy such a prominent and disproportionate place in our profession.  I do know that the most pervasive, blatant and overt possible discrimination could not keep them out.  Given the Jewish experience, and the very extensive efforts of all large law firms today to recruit and promote blacks, isn't it a little hard to blame black under-representation on some kind of hidden discrimination? 

The Progressive War Against Minority Kids

In the business world, the time honored way to break in and then get ahead is to underprice your competition and steal their business.  Your first instinct might be, you'll make more money by charging more.  Eventually, when you're on top, maybe you will.  But if you're starting out and don't have much of a track record, you need a way to get a foot in the door, and then you build from there.  The Waltons started out underpricing everybody else and rode it all the way to being billionaires.  They sell stuff rather than labor, but the principle isn't really any different when you've got nothing to sell but your time.  Lord knows that here in the law business, which is all about selling time, lots of cheaper guys are trying to steal our business every day.  And some of them succeed.  It would be great if we could come up with a way to stop that, but actually it's illegal even to discuss with our competitors how to keep the prices up.

So everybody gets to try to steal the other guy's business by selling cheaper.  Well, almost everybody.  The big exception is the group that most needs the right to underprice in order to get started, namely minority youth.  And thus we have the bizarre phenomenon of those posing as the champions of the underprivileged, namely the "progressives," in fact conducting a war against minority youth by taking away the single most important thing they have going for them to try to get started and get ahead in life, namely the ability to underprice the competition in order to crack into the working world.

Our new mayor, de Blasio, has long had minimum wage increases as a centerpiece of his agenda.  Hard to say he's corrupt, as opposed to just clueless.  He actually thinks that the government has the power to order businesses to pay workers any and all arbitrary amounts, and it will thus be so, without any adverse consequences.  The other players in the minimum wage game are far, far more cynical.  The latest maneuvering played out at the New York convention over the past weekend of something called the Working Families Party.  The WFP is not a real political party, but rather a creature created by and operated for the benefit of labor unions in the government and government-funded sectors, the biggest being education workers (UFT) and healthcare workers (SEIU).  Turns out that the WFP has a valuable "ballot line" to bargain with in the upcoming November gubernatorial election, which may be more competitive than some had thought previously.   Would they nominate someone to draw votes away on the left from Democratic nominee Cuomo?

These WFP people absolutely have as their number one interest keeping out the lower priced competition.  (I'm not sure de Blasio is savvy enough to realize that.)  And, to no surprise, the news coming out of the weekend convention of the WFP is that Cuomo essentially bought its endorsement by promising to support legislation to allow New York City to increase its minimum wage to $13.  That's no small increase from the current $8. 

Meanwhile, this report from 2013 puts the 18 - 29 year old African American unemployment rate at 20%, and Hispanic rate for the same age group at 12.6%.   I would have said that the excess that those rates reflect above the unemployment for everyone else is substantially caused by the minimum wage.  Well we're about to get a pretty good experiment to see who's right about that.  New York will raise its minimum to $13; Seattle is going to $15.  Will minority youth unemployment spike in these jurisdictions?  My money says it will.

And now, the more we learn about the new teachers' contract, the more we find out that at every decision point its goal is to protect the worst teachers at the expense of the vulnerable kids.  My personal favorite is that somehow the City agreed to replace independent teacher validators with "peer validators" jointly appointed by the union and the City.  Can there be any doubt that the goal of the union is to protect the job of every last teacher?  Then there are the new so-called PROSE schools, which the mayor brags about as encouraging innovation.  Here's what Jenny Sedlis of StudentsFirstNY has to say about them in a May 8 op-ed in the Post:

PROSE schools aren’t free from the most restrictive parts of the union contract: They can’t make changes to how they attract and retain teachers through compensation, they can’t adjust class size to adapt to new models or to afford added teachers in other subjects, they can’t exit low-performing teachers and they can’t keep their highest performers if they need to reduce positions.

Mayor de Blasio, the WFP, et al. of the "progressive" ilk, pose as the protectors of the minority kids while they are really conducting a war against them.  Can a few people please catch on? 

Old: The Rule Of Law. New: You Will Do As We Say.

You may think that the ongoing growth of the government, both in absolute size and relative to the rest of the economy, is perfectly OK.  After all, it's just the neutral apolitical experts fixing a few market imperfections and chasing the bad guys.  Of course they would never overstep the limits of their authority!

And then somewhere along the line regulators and prosecutors started to notice that big banks would settle literally any case, no matter how preposterous, and would pay big money to do it, in the process giving the regulator or prosecutor a chance for the big headlines.   The guy who really got the game going was then New York AG Eliot Spitzer with his $400 million Citibank settlement in late 2002.  After the financial crisis kicked off in 2008-09, every regulator and prosecutor in the country felt compelled to get in on the act.  2010 brought the Dodd-Frank Act, hundreds of new regulations and multiple new regulatory agencies, not least the unaccountable-to-anyone CFPB with its unlimited budget generated out of the ether at the Federal Reserve.  By 2013 the likes of JP Morgan was seemingly settling one big investigation every couple of weeks, usually for at least a few hundred million, if not a few billion.  In October 2013 JPM reported that even after all the settlements to that time, it had up a reserve of $23 billion to cover ongoing and future legal costs.  Yes, if you are a prosecutor or regulator, if you order one of these banks to jump, the response will be, how high?  Why should there be any problem with that?

And now we come to learn of something called Operation Choke Point.  I first read about it in a post by Todd Zywicki at the Volokh Conspiracy on the Washington Post site on May 24.  Zywicki states that the Operation has been "shrouded in secrecy," but he does link to previous mentions including one at Breitbart by Michael Patrick Leahy in January and another by Tom Blumer at bizzyblog on May 2.  But the Operation has been going on for well over a year, since at least some time in early 2013.

The basic idea is that the Feds identify businesses that they somehow consider shady or undesirable, and then put pressure on banks to refuse to do business with these people.  Note that "shady" and "undesirable" are not at all the same as "illegal."   According to an article in The Hill on April 24, the mechanism of the pressure is "flooding payments companies . . . with subpoenas, civil investigative demands, and other burdensome and costly legal demands" :

The “chokepoint” in this operation is the nation’s payments infrastructure, the means by which merchants process nearly $5 trillion in consumer purchases in the U.S. each year.  Federal law enforcers are targeting merchant categories like payday lenders, ammunition and tobacco sales, and telemarketers – but not merely by pursuing those merchants directly.  Rather, Operation Chokepoint is flooding payments companies that provide processing service to those industries with subpoenas, civil investigative demands, and other burdensome and costly legal demands.

An article in cryptocoinsnews.com in January identified some 30 industries targeted in the Operation to lose their sources of payments.  The industries include such things as ammunition sales, coin dealers, dating services, escort services, firearms and fireworks sales, payday loans, online loans, online gambling, pornography, tobacco sales, and lots more.

There will be much more to be learned about this as the story continues to break.  If there is one thing that the drug war has taught us, it is that the effort to shut a business down through "money laundering" enforcement only makes that business more profitable for those willing to take the bigger risks, drives out all semi-legitimate operators, and brings in the worst of the worst.  And the drugs continue to be available.

But predicting that all these services will continue to be available does not mean that a world where prosecutors can torture anyone they want by taking away their ability to get paid is an OK world.  One would think that there would be some sense of ethics that would kick in before an operation like this can get as far as it has gotten.  Shouldn't high level people at these agencies be protesting, resigning, and taking the case public?

And in other news, we learn from the New York Times yesterday that the Obama administration is planning to institute a government rating system for colleges and universities.  Well, there's a sure way to be sure that no criticism, no matter how slight, will ever come your way from that quarter!  OK, all these guys in academia were totally on the government payroll already, so they were never going to stick out their necks and criticize the government anyway.  But if you're the Obama administration, you're not going to take any chances.  Everybody must be a lackey.

Every day they have more ways to make you do as they say. 

The Catastrophic War On Poverty

Fifty years ago, Lyndon Johnson launched the so-called "War on Poverty," and that anniversary has brought forth a number of recent assessments from both left and right.

I do make a practice of calling out government failures of many sorts, and certainly there are plenty to keep a person busy.  But could there possibly be anything approaching the catastrophe of the War on Poverty?  For example, just a few days ago I pointed to the substantial number of deaths resulting from the government's automobile mileage standards, and from delayed approvals of new drugs.  But still, most people are able to find and buy a satisfactory automobile; and many new drugs do eventually get through the pipeline and improve people's lives.  Government involvement in education has driven up the cost of college and burdened large numbers of young people with outrageous debt; but still, large numbers of young people do manage to get good educations and move on to productive lives.  Similar things can be said about government involvement in other areas, from agriculture to health care to energy --  everywhere the government's involvement has been a major negative, but somehow most individuals manage to get around the obstructions and muddle through.

And then we come to the War on Poverty.  The government declared the War in 1964.   Here is some rhetoric from Johnson's 1964 State of the Union message:

[O]ur joint federal-local effort must pursue poverty, pursue it wherever it exists—in city slums and small towns, in sharecropper shacks or in migrant worker camps, on Indian Reservations, among whites as well as Negroes, among the young as well as the aged, in the boom towns and in the depressed areas.  Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it.

In the same year the government adopted a definition of "poverty" that makes poverty status turn on a particular level of annual cash income for a given family size.  Thus, by the government's own definition, "poverty" is purely a cash problem.  The government has then proceeded to spend fifteen or twenty or more (depending on how you count) trillions of dollars in a supposed effort to fix the "poverty," a number that is a multiple (approximately triple) of the amount that by the government's own definition would inherently completely end this purely cash problem.  And what has occurred?  The number of people in "poverty," as defined and measured by the government, has almost doubled.  It is an almost unimaginable disaster.

If you don't know that the number of people in "poverty" has almost doubled, it is probably because the government normally publishes its "poverty" statistics as a rate, that is, the percentage of the population that finds itself in "poverty" at any given time.  The figure you may have seen is the Census Bureau's "poverty rate," currently running at around 15+%.  Wikipedia has a helpful chart of Census Bureau "poverty" numbers from 1959 to present.  When they came up with the "poverty" definition in 1964, one of the first things they did was calculate what had happened to "poverty" as defined in the years immediately before.  And they calculated that the "poverty rate" had just gone down from about 22% in 1959 to about 15% in 1964.  With the start of supposed War, the previous rapid decline in the poverty rate abruptly ended.  Since 1964 the reported rate has drifted down to as low as about 11% at times, but right now is very near the same 15% where it was on the day the War began.  That's bad enough.  But the missing piece, of course, is that the population of the country has increased from about 192 million in 1964 to almost 320 million today.  And thus has the number of people "in poverty" gone from about 27 million in 1964 to about 47 million today.

And yet anti-poverty spending is currently running about $1 trillion per year if you count all expenditures at federal, state and local levels.  If you think about it, it's almost impossible to conceive of how you could spend that much money only to see the number of people in poverty double.  If you just passed the money out as cash, by the very definition the poverty would be cured; indeed, it would only take about a third of the money.   Instead, the main strategy is to pass out in-kind handouts -- public housing, food stamps, other nutrition programs, clothing programs, energy assistance, Medicaid -- and count none of it in the measure of "poverty."  And thus we get the worst of all possible worlds.  For an expenditure of double or triple what would be needed to end the poverty, we place the "beneficiary" population in the insulting and demeaning position of being able to consume only what their government overlords allow.  Would you rather have a smaller apartment and buy a car?  Too bad.  As a healthy twenty-something, would you rather forgo the lavish Medicaid health benefits and take a trip to California?  Tough luck.  A trillion dollars later -- and another trillion every year, year after year -- the supposed beneficiaries feel like they are still poor, and with good reason. 

Is it possible to defend the government's record on this issue?  I would say it can't be done with a straight face, but incredibly numerous leftists have used this 50th anniversary occasion to try.  For an example, check out this remarkable article by Dylan Matthews from January 8 in the Washington Post, titled "Everything you need to know about the war on poverty."  To show that the government anti-poverty programs are somehow working, Matthews first declares the government's own cash-income measure "completely meaningless."  This of course is the measure that the government has used to sell the gullible public on the anti-poverty spending in the first place.   Then Matthews shifts over to discussing something called the "supplemental" poverty measure (SPM), never mentioning that that is a new gizmo just come up with by the Obama administration in November 2012 to blunt criticism of the previous poverty measure, or that the SPM purports to measure "poverty" not as absolute deprivation, but rather as relatively low income, such that no amount of increased income for the poor can ever reduce the rate to near zero.  (Check out this article from Mickey Kaus at the Daily Caller on November 16, 2012 titled "MSM falls for "New coke" poverty con.")   Under the new measure, according to Matthews, "when you take government intervention into account, poverty is down considerably from 1967 to 2012, from 26 percent to 16 percent."  Fifty years and twenty trillion dollars, and with the poverty rate up from the 15% starting point no matter which way we count, let's just move the goal posts to wherever we like and declare success! 

Of Course The VA Hospital System Is Failing

Some time ago I had occasion to represent a movie studio for a number of years, and in that context I came to learn of something in that business that they called the "fifteen picture rule."  The rule held that it was difficult if not impossible for one studio successfully to produce more than about fifteen pictures per year.  Many had tried, only to meet with failure for one reason or another -- either they just couldn't meet their production goals, or they would find themselves producing a lot of expensive flops.  The rule was really a reflection of the limits on the time and attention of the top management talent needed to put together all the pieces that it takes to make a major movie.    When the Japanese electronics giant Sony wanted to enter the Hollywood film business in a big way, it tried to get around the rule by buying two studios, Columbia and Tri-Star, thus having two management teams.    Although they made more than fifteen pictures, they still were not a success at it.

Well, if a major movie is about a $100 million project, and the federal government is about a $3.5 trillion per year project, then we can think of the federal government as having undertaken to make the equivalent of about 35,000 movies per year with one top management team.  What is the chance that this can work out well?  Actually it's worse than that, because the chief executive of a movie business devotes nearly all of his time to the business of making movies, whereas the chief executive of the federal government starts out devoting half or more of his time to politics rather than operations -- speeches, fund raisers, press conferences.  Then there's meeting with foreign leaders and being commander in chief of the armed forces.  In the best of circumstances, how much time do the President and his top team have to devote to the actual operations of the domestic programs of the government?  And finally, add to this mix having a guy as CEO who has never shown the slightest interest in the domestic operations side of the job.

Actual socialist governments that try to take on the job of running a whole economy deal with the fifteen picture limitation by devoting their limited time and attention to the things they deem most important.  Inevitably that turns out to be the military and some form of secret police or palace guard to prevent revolutions and coups.  No time left to figure out how to make housing or food?  Too bad, the people can starve.  Think Cuba or North Korea for a current example.  In the old Soviet Union they had enough talent at least for a while to run a top-flight military, secret police (KGB), and a premier Olympic sports program.  That's about where they ran out of focus.  In the United States, with a huge capitalist system (thousands of independently-operating top management teams) we can generate a vast gusher of tax revenue for the government.  With that they can accomplish the task of mindlessly passing the money around, but no way can they  successfully run thousands of programs.

So now we have a massive VA healthcare bureaucracy in the classic government mode, where nobody at the top has any time to ride herd on them and there is no possibility of outsize rewards for anyone for making sure that the job gets done right.  What could possibly go wrong? James Taranto at Best of the Web has the following from vox.com:

According to internal emails later acquired by CNN, VA managers in Phoenix created a secret wait list in an attempt to hide that 1,400 to 1,600 sick veterans were forced to wait months to see a doctor. Even worse, top-level management supposedly knew of and defended the practice.  Besides the secret list, the Phoenix VA hospital already provided a different, official wait list to DC that allowed VA higher-ups to verify that patients are being treated in a timely manner (within 14 to 30 days).  But Phoenix's secret wait list supposedly avoided federal oversight with an elaborate scheme in which officials shredded evidence that some patients were taking months to be seen. What's worse, if someone died while waiting for an appointment due to the secret wait list, Phoenix officials would allegedly discard the name as if the fatal error never happened.

And that, it appears, is just the tip of the iceberg.  Taranto notes that the American Legion is tracking "issues with scheduling practices" in up to 18 states.  I'll confidently predict that by the time this is over it will be 50.  And do you think for a minute that our government's top management is doing any better job getting real performance out of the Department of Agriculture, or Education, or Energy, or HHS, or Labor, or Commerce?  All of these are out-of-sight out-of-mind at the moment.  And thus we give the bureaucracy $1 trillion per year to spend to alleviate poverty without making a dent in poverty.

The socialist delusion just will not die.  Even as the VA scandal breaks, Vermont plows forward with its in-the-works "socialism in one state" single payer health care scheme.  Here is a gushing, glowing write-up yesterday from MSNBC.  The word "bold" appears at least half a dozen times.  They're sure this will work because they hired a really, really smart "Harvard economist" (William Hsiao) to design it.  And with one central payer, the administrative savings alone will be huge!  

[Hsaio's] team found that if doctors and hospitals could submit claims to one central payer instead of dozens, the administrative savings alone would cut health care costs by 7% over 10 years. 

Well, Professor Hsaio, with no private property North Korea has done away with the enormous expense of having lawyers like me to define property and contract rights.   Why haven't those administrative savings brought it prosperity?

Perhaps the people from MSNBC should read Michael Totten's piece in the current City Journal, describing the Cuba existing today just outside its tiny bubble zones reserved for tourists.  It's not just that the buildings are falling down and there is nothing to eat.  Here's Totten's description of where Cuba's once touted health care has gotten to:

As for the free health care, patients have to bring their own medicine, their own bedsheets, and even their own iodine to the hospital. Most of these items are available only on the illegal black market, moreover, and must be paid for in hard currency—and sometimes they’re not available at all. Cuba has sent so many doctors abroad—especially to Venezuela, in exchange for oil—that the island is now facing a personnel shortage. “I don’t want to say there are no doctors left,” says an American man who married a Cuban woman and has been back dozens of times, “but the island is now almost empty." 

The Latest In New York's Rent Regulation Follies

In the never-ceasing quest of the New York progressive to achieve perfect economic fairness between and among all people, one of the prime policy tools is the so-called "affordable housing"  program.  The required article of faith is that the government can make housing plentiful and "affordable" to all by decreeing that it be so.   Eighty or so years into the game and with the most expensive housing prices in the country to show for it, the faith remains unshaken.  In fact, Mayor de Blasio if anything is leading a revival.

But of course, as usual with these things, nobody thought about the unintended consequences.  Lately, this has been getting humorous.

Because of the way the "affordable housing" programs have been set up, it turns out that over time there are more and more instances of people living in the same building, and in very comparable apartments, yet paying wildly different rents, sometimes one a multiple of another.   A rent regulation system that initially applied to entire buildings has become subject since the 90s to gradual deregulations that proceed one apartment at a time; and new "affordable housing" requirements put about 20% "affordable" apartments into many new buildings that otherwise are priced at the top of the market.

Add to this mix that today in Manhattan we have rather a super-heated apartment rental market, in substantial part the result of the shortage caused by rent regulation, affordability requirements, and restrictions on development.  Ordinary one-bedroom apartments in most neighborhoods rent for at least $3500 per month, two-bedrooms for $5000 per month, and apartments with anything special can go for substantial premiums above that.  The landlords and developers have noticed that they can get the premiums by installing so-called "amenities," often using space that previously went empty, like the basement and the roof.  Popular amenities include gyms, children's party areas, and roof gardens.

And now -- I know you'll be shocked -- it has started to be noticed that many landlords and condo associations who install the amenities make them available to the market rate tenants, but not to the rent-regulated and "affordable" tenants in the same building.   Grumblings about this have been around for several months, but got a big play this past Sunday on the front page of the Real Estate Section of the New York Times, in an article titled "What's Next, a Bouncer?", subtitle: "Rent-Regulated Tenants Excluded From Amenities." 

The article is mainly a series of quotes from rent regulated tenants complaining of being treated like "second class citizens."  It won't surprise you to learn that the tenants and buildings in question are not scattered around the city, but rather all but one are on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.  This is ground zero of political correctness and gentry progressivism, and also squarely within the New York 10 Congressional District, justly famous for combining the most efforts in the country to combat income inequality with the highest income inequality of all districts.   The buildings at issue include the Windermere at West End Avenue and 92nd, Stonehenge Village at Central Park West and 96th, 230 Riverside Drive, 40 Riverside Boulevard, and so forth.  In a neighborhood where you will be very hard pressed to find any apartment with a bedroom renting for under $3000 per month, the rents of two of these people are given as $1250 and $1107; a third is described as "rent-controlled," a special program with different rules where the rent (not given) is likely to be under $1000 per month.  

You might look at these people and say, they have really lucked out in life.  Each is getting several thousand dollars a month in free housing value, courtesy of some combination of the taxpayers, their landlord and their neighbors.  They are entitled to stay and keep that deal until they die.  Shouldn't they be counting their blessings?  Well, you don't understand the exquisite sense of entitlement of the Upper West Sider.  Here is the rent-controlled Ms. Sarah Denby:

"It’s ridiculous to have a gym here that I can’t use,” said Sarah Denby, who lives in a rent-controlled one-bedroom with her husband, Walter Brotman, a building resident for 60 years. “At one point I got so mad: I can store the bike in the bike room but I can’t have a key. I have to return it right away or the doormen freak out. They absolutely flip out. They just besiege me."

Oh, did we forget to mention that her building (230 Riverside Drive, which is a condominium) has 24-hour doormen, an amenity that costs her neighbors at least about $250,000 per year, none of which could possibly be covered by her rent?  Market one-bedroom rentals are currently available in the building at $3100 and $3300. 

You'll be glad to know that the local politicians have sprung into action to correct these terrible injustices.  Bills have been proposed in both the City Council and State Legislature to penalize landlords who provide less than equal access to amenities to the rent-regulated and "affordable" tenants.  Sponsors include Council members Mark Levine and Corey Johnson, and Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal.  But here's my question to you esteemed lawmakers:  If access to these gyms and gardens and storage areas is to be opened up to the "second class citizens" of New York, why only to the likes of Ms. Denby, who already is getting a $2000+ per month gift of discount housing courtesy of the taxpayers and her neighbors?  Why not also to all the less fortunate hardworking citizens who have no access to the rent-controlled apartments and live in relatively cheap but remote market rate units in deep Brooklyn and the Bronx?  In any kind of "fair" world, aren't those people equally or even more entitled than Ms. Denby to access to the gym at 230 Riverside Drive?

And while we're on the subject of the rent regulation follies, here is a report from yesterday's New York Law Journal on a decision handed down Monday from the Manhattan Housing Court by Judge Sabrina Kraus in a case called RSP 86 Property v. Sylvester.    It seems that the landlord decided to try to evict Mr. Sylvester from his rent-regulated apartment on 86th Street using one of the difficult-to-implement grounds, namely a claim that the apartment was not Mr. Sylvester's "primary residence."  The court denied the application, finding that the 89-year-old Mr. Sylvester had lived in his 900-square-foot, $1090 per month apartment (market rent would be $3500 - $4000) for some 45 years, had been registered to vote there all that time, received mail there, and "has deep roots in Manhattan."  Are you sympathetic?  Other facts mentioned are that he "spends most of his time" "wintering" at a condo in Florida and "summering" in East Hampton.  Also, that his "cars" are registered in Manhattan.  Now, I know that Jerry Seinfeld has multiple cars in Manhattan, but not a lot of other people, including many quite wealthy people, can afford that kind of luxury.

We keep thinking that we can achieve perfect fairness by government decree, but somehow the harder we try the farther we seem to be from the goal.