As the conversation on rent regulation gains momentum in Albany, once again the landlord lobby is falsely claiming that the major capital improvements program, which has led to billions of dollars in rent hikes, is necessary for maintaining habitable buildings and providing good jobs to local residents.

These tired arguments have been repeated to the tenant movement for decades in an attempt to threaten us and scare us. MCIs were enacted in 1969 at the request of landlords who argued that, thanks to rent stabilization, they were unable to maintain their buildings and needed incentives to make repairs. The MCI law didn’t lead to an improved housing stock. The Bronx burned along with the rest of the city.

Today, landlords make the same claim—that without any incentives or additional rent hikes it will be the 1970s all over again.

Let me paint a starkly different reality. I have lived on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx since 1992. For 23 years, we only received patchwork repairs. My corporate landlord, a company with 75 buildings in its growing portfolio, already received annual rent increases from the Rent Guidelines Board during this period to pay for maintenance. In 2015, our landlord began gut-renovating all of our bathroom and kitchens.

At first, I was ecstatic and welcomed these changes after decades of neglect. But the work dragged on for weeks. Sixty families had to share a single bathroom and could not cook. After the work was completed, I was astounded to receive a letter from the state's Division of Homes and Community Renewal informing us our landlord had applied for a permanent rent increase.

Was the work necessary? No. Our bathrooms and kitchens worked perfectly fine. It was purely cosmetic and in fact, raised the value of the building for our corporate landlord. Several of my neighbors have already moved out because of the first hike. We expect the state housing agency to rubber-stamp another four MCIs for windows, pointing, elevators and re-piping, which would mean rent hikes of hundreds of dollars.

I had never heard of an MCI. Now I know it’s another tool of displacement that landlords have weaponized against us. And it’s all starting to make sense to me. With the recent rezoning of Jerome Avenue, displacement has intensified. My landlord was not fixing the building for us, the long-term tenants, but for the people earning higher incomes who are moving into the Bronx and replacing us. Across the city, landlords are using MCIs to push rent-regulated apartments rapidly out of rent stabilization or closer to this year's deregulation rent threshold of $2,775.

It angers me. We always paid rent and deserved to live in good conditions. The MCI program is notoriously rife with fraud (even the president's family reportedly took advantage of it) and the state is incapable of actual oversight. This month, Homes and Community Renewal approved the highest MCI in history for cosmetic work for $56 million, raising regulated rents by $400 to $1,200.

MCIs do not create stable jobs for local residents. In fact, in several buildings my landlord simply subcontracted the buildings’ superintendent to perform more than $15 million in MCI work, according to documents submitted to the state. Construction jobs associated with MCIs are either nonexistent or do not pay well or provide a stable career. They exploit vulnerable nonunion workers not always adequately trained.

It comes down to profit over people. Landlords neglect their buildings and then MCIs generously reward them. The building value skyrockets and landlords claim MCIs as depreciable assets to the IRS. Landlords threaten to leave us in ruins when they are already offered billions in city and state tax breaks. It’s not that landlords don’t have resources or money to maintain buildings. It’s that they profit the most when we as tenants pay for our own displacement.

New York is in an unprecedented housing crisis. Nearly 100,000 New Yorkers are homeless and over 5 million renters have no strong protections. The legislation recently introduced by state Sen. Michael Gianaris and Assemblyman Brian Barnwell to eliminate MCIs must pass this session. If our elected leaders truly care about the diversity of New York and protecting working-class communities of color, they will end this much-abused program.

Anita Long is a member of the No More MCIs Coalition and a leader at Community Action for Safe Apartments, a tenant-organizing project of New Settlement Apartments that primarily works in the southwest Bronx.