Rent Is Too Damn High Party founder faces eviction

Jimmy McMillan, the eccentric New York City resident who ran for New York State governor in 2010 as the candidate from the Rent Is Too Damn High Party, is facing eviction from his low-rent apartment in the East Village.

McMillan pays $872.96 for a rent-controlled ground-floor apartment on St. Marks Place in the East Village that he moved into during the late 1970s, when the rent was around $275, the New York Post reports.

The building's owner, Lisco Holdings, claims in court documents that McMillan has violated the lease because he doesn’t truly live there. "This is a case where the landlord alleges that it's not the tenant's primary residence," said Robert Goldstein, an attorney representing the firm that owns the building.

In an interview last fall, McMillan told the New York Times that he lived in an apartment on Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn's Flatbush section rent-free in exchange for performing maintenance work at the building. But, according to the New York Post, McMillan now insists he simply uses the Brooklyn apartment as his office, which is also the headquarters of the Rent is Too Damn High Party.

McMillan, who drew attention in the 2010 gubernatorial race for his wraparound moustache and goatee, his black gloves and his wacky comments in election debates as much as for his party’s platform of lowering rents, told Reuters that the landlord’s claims were “baseless.” He said the landlord wants him out because he wants to raise the rent. McMillan also said he’d asked his lawyer to file a counter claim for $70,000.

“It’s not about me,” McMillan told The Local East Village, a blog published by the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University and the New York Times. “It’s about what I caught all the landlords doing to people – raising rent for no reason [and] using their lawyers to intimidate them into leaving. But they can’t intimidate me. The burden of proof is on them. They have to prove that I don’t live there and they can’t do that. I’m here to make sure that the people understand their rights.”

If McMillan is forced out of his rent-controlled apartment, New York City rental laws give the landlord the right to raise the monthly fee to any rent the market can bear, meaning the next person who moves into the place will almost certainly pay rent that is too damn high.