Talk Bronx New York

A Bigger Penalty for Riders Who Cheat on the Fare

The bad old days of subway turnstile jumping may be gone, but the fine for trying to sneak a free ride went up on Monday anyway, to $100 from $60 — the first increase in nearly a quarter century.

From Jan. 1 through July 6 this year, transit police issued 41,090 tickets for fare evasion and arrested an additional 8,437 people for not paying the subway fare, according to police data. That is an average of 263 tickets or arrests a day for fare evasion in a subway system with a volume of more than five million rides on an average weekday.

Things were very different in the early 1990s, when the system was in the throes of a fare-beating epidemic.

In the first six months of 1991 the transit police issued 123,773 summonses and made 9,942 arrests for fare evasion, according to a report in The New York Times. That was an average of about 743 tickets and arrests a day, at a time when ridership was much lower.

Just a year earlier, in 1990, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority estimated that more than 200,000 people jumped a subway turnstile every day. By 1997, with stronger enforcement, an improving transit system and the advent of new turnstiles for use with MetroCards (the turnstile barriers are longer and harder to squeeze past), the estimate of farebeaters had fallen to 35,000 a day.

The authority no longer makes such estimates public, but the data on arrests and summonses suggests that while turnstile jumping has not gone the way of the token, it is no longer as common as it was in the early 1990s. But even as fares rose and the subway system improved, the fine for fare beating remained unchanged.

It was set at $60 in 1984 and went into effect the following year, when a special tribunal was set up to handle transit offenses, like turnstile jumping, riding on the outside of a subway car or playing loud music in a station.

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Community Action for Safe Apartments watching for corporate landlords

Correction
An article in the July 8 edition of Bronx Boro News about tactics by some private equity-backed developers who acquire rent-regulated buildings to force tenants out inaccurately identified Pinnacle Group as the owner of a building at 1005 Walton Ave. in the Bronx. While the article correctly stated that the property is managed by Chestnut Holdings, Chestnut owns the building, not Pinnacle. The News regrets the error.

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The Bronx’s real estate market is hot, but instead of worrying about gentrification, tenant advocates fear that private equity firms snapping up apartment buildings may become a new breed of slumlord.

Community Action for Safe Apartments is working with tenants in 19 of the estimated 277 buildings in the borough bought in recent years by private-equity-backed developers like Pinnacle, SG2, Ocelot, Normandy, Urban American Management and others.

The concern is that the only way to squeeze the high returns demanded by private equity firms from rent-regulated units is to force existing tenants out and rent the units at market rates.

Developers counter that the long-term profit prospects are also attractive.

Mayor Bloomberg recently signed Local Law 7, a new anti-harassment law giving tenants added protection from landlord pressure, so advocates are watching for tactics owners sometimes use to convince rent-regulated tenants to give up their leases, like eviction threats, contrived arrears charges, neglected repairs and high-pressure buyout offers.

Carla Brooks, a mother of five who has lived in a rent-controlled building at 1005 Walton Ave. for 12 years, and has a Section 8 rent subsidy, said she is being threatened with eviction over supposed arrears.

Chestnut Holdings, which owns the building, contends that her portion of the monthly rent nearly doubled starting in January.

But Brooks said she didn’t receive her new lease until March, and even that only listed the total amount - part of which is paid by Section 8. It was only in April that she received a letter from the city telling her that her rent obligation had increased.

“Now, [Chestnut] says I owe them $1,500, and they’re starting eviction proceedings,” Brooks said.

Chestnut’s lawyer, James Mantea, blamed the Section 8 bureaucracy for the delays and confusion, and said the court case was meant to pressure the city Housing Authority, which administers the Section 8 program.

“Sometimes, you have to have an active case pending to get Section 8 [administrators] to take action and make adjustments,” Mantea said. “Ms. Brooks was never in danger of losing her apartment.”

Brooks also complains that plumbing work has left her family of six without toilets or sinks for more than a month.

“The only running water we’ve had has been the bathtub,” Brooks said.

Other tenants have complained gaping holes left by stalled plumbing work have led to rat infestations.

Mantea said the building-wide plumbing renovation is being held up by a few tenants refusing workers access to their apartments.

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