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Adam Lehodey writing at City Journal:
In New York City, making a profit on real estate has become increasingly difficult. Rent-stabilization laws built on the mantra that “housing is a human right,” a dysfunctional housing court, and myriad other interventions have driven thousands of units off the market, giving rise to the phenomenon of New York’s “ghost apartments.”
The city now has nearly 50,000 empty units, absent from the market either because their operating costs exceed legal rents or because they require considerable renovations.
…Take a building on East 6th Street as an example. A mere five-minute walk from Tompkins Square, the building is a convenient home for students and young professionals.
One-bedroom units in the building average $3,500— except two of them, subject to the city’s rent-stabilization laws, which hold rents below $900 per month.
As a result, both units have been allowed to fall into disrepair, because the cost of restoring them to habitability is greater than what they’d generate in rent.
…Much of the predicament at the East 6th Street building and the apartments on Valentine Avenue can be traced back to one piece of legislation: the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act (HSTPA). Passed by a Democratic majority in the state legislature, HSTPA eliminated landlords’ abilities to raise rents after units were vacated, or when they exceeded $2,775 per month. In doing so, it also eliminated their ability to make improvements profitably and reset the stabilized rent.
Recall from the recent review by Kholodilin that “the published studies are almost unanimous with respect to the impact of rent control on the quality of housing….[namely] that rent control leads to a deterioration in the quality of those dwellings subject to regulations.”
The post Rent Control Creates Ghost Apartments appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
He [Frederick Douglass] saw markets offered a crucial alternative to paternalism. A free labor market, Douglass said, would “let us stand upon our own legs, work with our own hands, and eat bread in the sweat of our own brows.” Douglass told white philanthropists that market participation by the former slaves was “the best way to help them,” which “is just to let them help themselves.
The use of force against those who propound error is wrong, not because it is inexpedient but because it is an outrage upon the freedom of man and, in that, upon the very nature of man.
Thank goodness we now have Washington elites saving us from the freedom to choose to purchase goods that they (in all the glory of their bureaucratic omniscience) know to be bad for us.