"In some neighborhoods of the Bronx and in Harlem, fully a third of the housing stock was literally abandoned by its owners: it was easier to just walk away and let the building rot than to take any action to repair it and continue to collect rent-controlled rents."
It's absolutely scandolous that landlords would be allowed to get away with doing that.
They should be taxed severely if they don't rent out the property within a certain amount of time, or perhaps just have the government take over ownership in that case.