Landlords abusing tenants is totally irrelevant because rent control doesn't address that problem at all, it just shifts that abuse to new tenants for the benefit of long term residents, since the entire policy is a wealth transfer to people who never move from where they live.
Without rent stabilization, landlords can and do raise rents arbitrarily to drive our particular renters and then offer better rents to preferred renters. Or equally likely drive out a family to subdivide an apartment into multiple rooms to rent.
If you pass laws that say, for example, you have to offer a renewal to an existing tenant, that doesn’t help, they’ll just play the same game with the rent. Mandate that the same rent has to be offered to new and existing? Well now we are in the realm of price controls.
The power dynamic is so massive between landlords and tenants, especially for people who aren’t fortunate enough to have disposable income, that there needs to be some sort of protection.
This is positing that landlords engage in complicated schemes to lower the rent they are paid. I speak with supreme confidence, the median landlord is not going to do that unless these 'preferred renters' are measurably better than the people getting kicked out, in ways that make objective sense. Frankly, if a landlord is engaging in this practice then they probably aren't a 'landlord', they've just taken the property out of the rental market so their kids can live there or something.
> ...drive out a family to subdivide an apartment into multiple rooms to rent.
A landlord is much more likely to do that, but the complaint here is that there are people willing to value the m2 of the apartment higher than the family. There is no way to block that from happening without price controls and, eventually, shortages emerging.
The landlords in the article are greedy, they don't want their apartments to be empty. They want to be renting them out for whatever the most willing renter is going to give them. But they also aren't stupid, and they aren't going to rent them out anticipating that they will make losses.
That’s all well and good but that isn’t the issue. Part of the contract for renting an apartment in NYC is that you must offer renewals. A lease is a contract that, unless there’s an eviction, only the tenant can end. And allowing landlords to violate the spirit of the law by saying “we didn’t kick them out we only raised the rent to $10k/mo” defeats the whole purpose of it which is to not rip housing out from underneath people.
But it is going to be mighty difficult to take people who take up the landlord side of that deal. And things like, say, 60k rent controlled apartments sitting empty seems like a reasonable outcome - y'know, might have to be an idiot to rent out an apartment for a deal that bad. It sounds ruinous. Sounds like a bad law, really.
I'll also point out that despite the fact that rent stabilization isn't required for new rental construction, there are a few areas in nyc where the city offered incentives in the form of property tax abatements in exchange for the landlords agreeing to rent stabilization - what do you think happened? Almost all of the new construction in those areas agreed to being rent stabilized. If it was so bad, so ruinous, why would they agree to that?
The story here isn't "rent stabilization is bad", it's "landlords are having a hissy fit that they can't exploit their tenants as much as before, so they're keeping apartments off the market on the off chance they win a court case"
And no-one is getting tricked here, it seems pretty obvious what is going on.
> The story here isn't "rent stabilization is bad", it's "landlords are having a hissy fit that they can't exploit their tenants as much as before, so they're keeping apartments off the market on the off chance they win a court case"
What do you think the symptoms would be if rent stabilisation was bad?
Bad for whom? Tenants? Landlords?
If landlords of rent stabilized buildings were declaring bankruptcy and the city had to take over and operate the buildings, that would be a clear sign that the economics of rent stabilization made it impossible for the free market to work.
Except that hasn’t happened, in fact, being a landlord is still so lucrative that they can afford to keep units off the market in the event of the small chance that the laws get changed in the next year.
I can guarantee you that once the court case is settled, those units will gradually come back on the market and everything will go back to the way it was.
As both the article and the GP pointed out, rent stabilization does allow for rents to increase.
Are you trying to say they aren't allowed to increase enough, or are you under the impression they don't rise at all?
In any case, the exact same economic phenomena has been observed regardless of if you fix rent increases to inflation or never allow for rents to increase, because the two approaches are just incredibly similar variants of price controls.