St. Mark's Bookshop and the surrounding community have been campaigning for landlord Cooper Union to lower the store's rent from $20,000 to $15,000 a month. The Cooper Square Committee yesterday delivered to Cooper Union a petition that accrued nearly 44,000 signatures, but it wasn't enough: the bookshop's rent will not be lowered.

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St. Mark's Bookshop has fallen on hard times lately, inspiring a local campaign to pressure landlord Cooper Union to lower the rent from $20,000/month to a more manageable $15,000. Otherwise, the store might have to close.

According to a letter from the Cooper Square Committee, today is the day that Cooper Union's board will decide whether or not to lower the rent -- essentially deciding the fate of the bookshop.

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Local institution St. Mark's Bookshop is in danger of closing, and the Cooper Square Committee, a neighborhood group, has started a petition to try to save the independent bookstore. Rising rents and decreasing revenue have put the bookshop's future in jeopardy as the owners attempt to negotiate with their landlord, Cooper Union.

St. Mark's Bookshop moved to its current location at the ground floor of the Cooper Union residence building on Third Avenue and 9th Street around 18 years ago. Co-owner Bob Contant says that Cooper Union offered a 20 percent reduction on the rent in order to entice the bookshop to be its commercial tenant (the store was originally located around the corner on St. Mark's Place). This has come back to haunt St. Mark's Bookshop recently, as a little over two years ago Cooper Union raised the store's rent to $20,000 a month.

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According to a new report from Citi Habitats, your chances of finding and renting an apartment in the city, always a tremendous pain unless you are very, very lucky, or very, very rich, have gone up a bit. That is to say, it's not quite so difficult because the vacancy rate has increased...to 1 percent. This, though it may not sound like much, is actually the highest vacancy rate in 6 months, and, Gary Malin, president of Citi Habitats, says, a correction to "brutal" conditions earlier this summer. Rents for studios and one bedrooms went up slightly, while rents on larger places went down a bit.

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Nic Cage as Balthazar Blake

Shares of movie rental giant Netflix fell 10% before the market opened on Friday. Share prices plunged $23.90 to $209.37 after news that customers would no longer be able to stream the Nic Cage fantasy adventure The Sorcerer's Apprentice. The film, in which Cage plays thousand-year-old sorcerer Balthazar Blake, was a Walt Disney production. Starz Entertainment owns pay-cable rights to movies from Walt Disney Studios and they pulled out of a deal with Netflix to extend those rights to stream a multitude of films, most notably The Sorcerer's Apprentice.

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Shockingly, Faye Dunaway is facing eviction in Manhattan housing court. More shockingly, Faye Dunaway pays $1048.72 a month for her rent-stabilized 1-bedroom walkup on East 78th. Slightly less shockingly, Dunaway may not actually inhabit the apartment, but instead lives in California, per a lawsuit filed by her landlord yesterday. Her son Liam Dunaway O'Neill is a subtenant in the apartment, and has acknowledged on Twitter that he also lives in California. But according to rent-stabilization rules, Dunaway would need to inhabit 78th Street as a primary residence -- though the New York Times does point out that she's not living particularly glamorously in either abode, despite once inhabiting a far more fancy apartment at the Eldorado.

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Joan Marcus

Since 1996, the musical Rent has entered the musical theater pantheon, won a Pulitzer, and been praised, parodied, and panned (when it made its way to the screen). Now, three years after the show closed its Broadway run after 12 years in 2008, a revival is in previews at New World Stages off-Broadway, and is set to open August 11.

Surely, you know the story. Rent is the work of rising talent Jonathan Larson, who died suddenly just before its off-Broadway opening; the show is about a group of friends in the East Village, many of whom suffer from HIV/AIDS.

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This is what angry renters look like.

Affordable housing can be nearly impossible to find in New York today -- unless you are lucky enough to reside in one of the city's 1-million-plus rent-stabilized apartments.

But even that refuge is being chipped away at.

Last night the Rent Guidelines Board voted to increase the amount landlords can hike rents for those apartments to 3.75 percent for one-year leases and 7.25 percent for two-year leases.

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David Shankbone

In 2009, a landmark state appeals court ruling found that the owners of Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village had illegally deregulated 4,400 apartments while enjoying special tax breaks from the city. Its impact wasn't quite clear; no one was sure what the legal rents of those apartments should be or how much the wronged tenants should receive in rebates.

Now, a bill is making its way through the state Senate that, as the Times succinctly puts it, "would allow landlords to buy their way out of the problem."

Tenant advocates and Dan Garodnick, the councilman who represents Stuy Town, hotly oppose the bill. Garodnick — who was also born and raised and still lives there — gives Runnin' Scared his take.

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Heir to Reagan

Jimmy McMillan of the Rent Is Too Damn High Party, and his facial hair, will be joining forces with the GOP. PBS caught up with McMillan on St. Mark's and discussed his move. He was a hit at CPAC recently, and said he registered to be a Republican because "the Democratic Party sucked." Who said two-party politics isn't fun?

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