5 days ago
Don't fall for the rent-freeze demagogues — they'll make NY's housing squeeze WORSE
Left-wing mayoral candidates and a newly launched 'housing justice' pressure group are dangling the promise of a multi-year rent freeze for the city's nearly one million rent-regulated units.
That's more than half the rental apartments in Gotham.
It's a cynical political strategy: Pander to a segment of single-issue voters almost too large to resist — and capture the mayoralty.
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Actually implementing that freeze would turn the entire city into a slum of dilapidated and abandoned buildings, forcing thousands of occupants to live in squalor in un-maintained apartments.
And it could happen.
Just look at the electoral math.
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In New York City, occupants of rent-stabilized apartments — about 1.7 million people living in about 980,000 units — outnumber renters in unregulated apartments.
If these rent-regulation beneficiaries are mobilized as single-issue voters, they can swing an election.
Barely a million people voted in the 2021 mayoral primary, and just over 1.1 million in the general.
Leftist candidates are not leaving it to chance.
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Zohran Mamdani, Brad Lander and Jessica Ramos have all committed to freezing rents if they're elected.
'Tenants are a majority and it's time we had a mayor who acted like it,' Mamdani says.
He's calculating that this one voting bloc can carry him to victory.
New York State Tenant Bloc, the new pressure group launched by the lefty nonprofit Housing Justice for All, is making the same calculation statewide.
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'There are over 9 million tenants in New York,' its website declares.
'There's millions more tenants than there are landlords. We have the power to break the real estate industry's grip on our lives by uniting as a bloc.'
'Freeze the Rent!' — plastered on scarlet signs reminiscent of Communist China's flag — is the group's battle cry.
Cornell professor Russell Weaver, who teaches courses in 'equitable community change,' calls tenants the 'sleeping giant' in future elections.
Some are already awake: Assemblywoman Sarahana Shrestha, a Democratic Socialist representing the Hudson Valley, credits activist tenant voters for her own win in 2022.
Now she's sponsoring the REST Act, which would permit towns and cities in all parts of the state to impose rent caps.
Current law limits rent stabilization to New York City and downstate counties, unless a town performs a costly study to prove low vacancy rates — a requirement that has kept Poughkeepsie and Kingston from capping rents.
Shrestha rants that 'tenants are half the state' and should vote as a bloc to throttle 'price-gouging landlords.'
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But before falling for this demagoguery, New Yorkers need to know the brutal consequences of rent regulations and rent freezes.
The nine members of the city's Rent Guidelines Board — all mayoral appointees — set permissible rent hikes on rent-regulated apartments once a year.
Succumbing to political pressure, the RGB generally sets hikes at about half the inflation rate — so building owners facing rising property taxes and higher labor, energy and water costs get consistently shortchanged.
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Eventually, many let their properties fall into disrepair, allow dilapidated units to sit vacant — or abandon their buildings altogether.
With older housing stock crumbling and fewer units available, a housing shortage is inevitable.
Sean Campion, the Citizens Budget Commission's housing expert, testified to the RGB this year that a significant share of buildings is heading into this maintenance 'death spiral.'
That's the damage already caused by rent regulation — even before the leftists' threatened freeze.
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Nationwide, rents in metro areas have fallen for 19 consecutive months — except, that is, in New York City, where the supply squeeze sends rents on unregulated units soaring.
Denver, the metro area where rents are falling fastest, has no rent regulation.
Colorado state law forbids it.
That's what New York state should do.
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What about helping the poor?
Rent regulation doesn't accomplish that.
Scoring a rent-regulated apartment requires no means testing.
You need luck, sharp elbows — and often a wad of cash to buy your way in.
Occupants of rent-regulated apartments — call them privileged renters — tend to have somewhat smaller incomes, but are also generally adults without kids.
Families with young children, who need rent breaks the most to remain in the city, are less apt to luck out, according to the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development.
A fair system would provide assistance based on need — funded by all taxpayers, not only by building owners.
New York doesn't command certain grocery stores to sell food at below-market prices to the needy.
The taxpayer-funded SNAP program is there for that purpose.
Rent regulation rewards pandering politicians, not the poor.
That's why it survives.
The radical calls for a rent freeze are a red flag that New Yorkers risk being crushed — steamrolled — by a mobilized bloc of voters looking out only for themselves.
Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York and co-founder of the Committee to Save Our City.
