Yeah. The law wants people to be able to live in an apartment without paying to build it, where someone else handles the maintenance and the rent doesn't go up that much. Great deal for the tenant, if they can find it.
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.
It sounds like you think landlords got tricked into this system - rent stabilization (again, that is different than rent control, as you named it) has been around for more than 50 years. Very few of these landlords owned these buildings before they became rent stabilized, so they knew what they were getting themselves into before they bought them.
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"
Why do people work lousy jobs? It just has to be a smidgen better than doing nothing for a landlord to rent out there apartment. And the microeconomic situation of taxes and who-knows-what can cause strange things to happen. But if pushed far enough they'd start losing money and stop renting out apartments. Or you'd get some new rental stock but less than a freer market would provide.
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?
> 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.
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.