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Last night while the NYC Mayor was watching basketball, I went to the Bronx and attended the Rent Guidelines Board meeting. Wow, was it painful. For nearly five hours, tenant after tenant approached the microphone and begged, yelled and demanded a rent freeze.
What was so astounding is the sheer consistency of the testimonies. The primary belief was that Landlords = evil. They "put profits over people", "lack compassion", are "negligent" and "bad actors". The few landlords courageous enough to testify were shouted down.
Nobody spoke about the past or future. Nobody connected the rent freezes to the maintenance issues. Every single person complained about bad conditions. When you artificially freeze the rent, you freeze the maintenance budget and decay the housing.
I was tempted to put my name down and speak. I wanted to talk about what I have been finding as I dig into NYC rent control housing. That 57% of rent stabilized buildings are cash-flow negative. That 10% are in serious financial distress. That units are going for $30k.
I wanted to explain that even if a landlord has a portfolio of buildings, they are legally prohibited from using profits of one building to pay for another. That many of the "rich landlords" all these tenants were angry at, are going out of business. That many are underwater.
I wanted to explain how rent freezes do not lead to a transfer of equity from landlord to tenant. They are a transfer from the *maintenance budget* to the tenant. That their low rent is the *reason* for the rats, the leaks, the mold.
Many of the people there called for social housing, public housing, and an end to capitalism. I wanted to ask "without capitalism, who builds the buildings?" I wanted to point out that the natural state of housing is a cave or a hut. Not a building with laundry & wifi.
One thing I found fascinating is the comfort with which the tenants demand services. They wanted their hallways clean, the rats killed by the super, the garbage taken out, the laundry room serviced, the leaks repaired, the walls painted, the roof patched, the windows replaced.
Not a single person mentioned the labor or cost associated with all these services. It was just *expected*. "We deserve to live in housing with dignity." "I am NOT going to live in a studio apartment for $2k" "I have the right to clean hallways."
I wanted to ask if anybody is helping take care of the buildings they live in. Some people had been renters for 3 or 4 *decades*. Some mentioned 20 years of fighting with their landlord. I so desperately wanted to ask - "Have you ever taken out the building's trash?"
I lay awake in bed last night thinking about it all. NYC has created an enormous housing mess. There are 2.4 million tenants living in apartments they can't afford. They are trapped - by leases that are so below market rate they can't afford to leave.
Many complained that their children can't afford to live nearby. Unfortunately, that is the end result of freezing a neighborhood in ember. People spoke about wanting to live the rest of their lives with their neighbors. Do they want new neighbors, too?
It occurred to me that the experiment underway in rent control will ultimately be self-correcting. Buildings can only last so long without major capital injections. Like an animal that requires blood to survive, a building requires cash. It requires cash to fix the roof.
Multiple people last night spoke about roofs caving in. About the lawsuits they planned to file. About broken heat, elevators, and boilers. All these things cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The capped rents don't cover it. So the buildings rot.
The housing crisis in NYC is man-made. But it is ultimately nature that will prevail. Vermin, pests, and mold don't care who holds the lease. They don't care about how much the landlord "cares" about the tenants. When the buildings leak, they move in.