with those two things effectively capping and restricting new buildings, their contents and capacities… without the rent laws you wouldn’t have the little people around that run the place. they would live too far out to get in and make bagels int he morning, deliver packages, etc.

they favor tenants who get into a nice place and stay a long time rather than get a home or leave to other parts of the USA…

sometimes they keep a neighborhood that isnt so nice from becoming an empty ghost town till it cleans up.

but the key to all these things are the interlocking laws and how they work TOGETHER not laws in isolation.

abortion with social engineering picking winners and making losers is eugenics (as the winners tend to go less to abortion, and the created losers by denouement tend to go a lot more or misplan due to circumstances that change with political whim)

if you stopped the height caps, removed zoning contortions… the building boom would make apartments cheaper than rent control prices and they could be halted.

do note huge numbers of section 8 welfare housing units…

which is the real key to this rent control law…

buildings are run by landlords and by the state… they charge stabilized prices…

rents are paid by regular people who are always the focus, but ALSO paid by the state on behalf of a HUGE percentage of section 8 housing.

if they let the rents double, their welfare pay outs for housing double or triple over night.

they CANT change those rent laws because they set the prices that feed back to the welfare rolls.

this despite that on average they are raised at a faster than inflation rate while salaries mostly have not been keeping par.

i would love a 7% increase just once in the past 8 years of working… but i have not even gotten 3% in years… my salary has been pretty flat while here and i have watched my rent go from 800 to 1300 in 3-10% increments with no 0% raises ever whether good times or bad.

a 50k salary with 3% a year raises goes to 67k in 10 years. A 1000k a month rent with an average raise of 6% would rise to 1790 in 10 years.

the person living in such a situation would have to find 9480 a year more for rent. their salary went up 17k, but so did their tax liability. couple this with rising fuel, inflation, and other costs like health..

and with rent controls you cant keep up if your not way ahead to start with. at the end of it all, you have nothing and your landlord has million dollar equity (the equity value is never discussed as the claim is to have one apartment building capable of supporting itself and the kind of landlord that has one building. the argument is seldom about the companies that literally own thousands, and can be wretches as property owners)

Gringo, funny you should say that. I just finished retiling a wall, repairing some drywall, and fixing a plethora of other small but long-deferred maintenance jobs, preparatory to listing our house for sale on our target date of 1 March.

Sorry.

One last comment. One of the arguments for instituting rent control was to “maintain socioeconomic diversity,” which translated from the Gibberish into English means, “the servants, maids, doormen, chauffeurs, bank tellers, store clerks, barkeepers, flunkies and other assorted hoi polloi who wait on us have to live somewhere, or we’ll have to do that crap ourselves.”

So let the wealthy price everyone out of NYC, and then, inevitably, its environs. Who then does the scut work? The wealthy? Of course not. Either flunky wages rise, the city becomes less attractive to the wealthy, new construction takes place, something, but a city comprising only the wealthy is unsustainable.

In any case, socioeconomic equilibrium will be re-established. The problem with rent control is that it interferes with establishment of that equilibrium. Leftist tinkering with the economic ecosystem causes (or exacerbates) the very problems it seeks to ameliorate.

A metaphorical case in point: when lightning strikes started forest fires the Forest Service used to rush to put them out. Yet periodic fires are part of the ecosystem, burning out underbrush without damaging established trees (because the fires are accompanied by the rain of the thunderstorm), and clearing the ground for the seeds of new trees to take root. (The seeds are sequoias need such fires to be activated, btw.)

Fighting the fires allowed a lot of underbrush to collect around trees so that when a fire could not be controlled, it burnt the surrounding trees too, and in the meantime the underbrush and unburnt leaves and needles on the ground prevented new trees from taking root.

Turns out Mother Nature knew best, and earnest tinkering was counterproductive. Imagine.

I am hearing this from someone residing in the tarnished Golden State.

Leave.

Simple, really.

I couldn’t get out of there (this apartment building in particular, NYC in general, the whole Northeast for that matter) fast enough.

Yes, they have.

I rent. At any time before my lease is up, my landlady can tell me that she’s chosen to no renew my lease, and I would have to
find accomodations on my own.

And I would love to have my rent set at 59% of the going rate.

But it’s also time liberals take their lumps and admit that explicit provisions of the Constitution mean exactly what they say, with no “adumbrations” or “penumbrae” read into them.

Property encompasses far more than just a nominal fee simple interest in real estate.