The Case Against Rent Control:
Myths, Lies & Editorials

On May 1st, the day after the abrupt “You can’t fire me, I quit” departure of Rent Guidelines Board chair Ed Hochman, the Daily News lead editorial stated, “Deregulate Already.”

Confusing the RGB’s deliberate failure to fulfill its mandate (to enforce the rent laws and keep rents affordable for 2.3 million New Yorkers living in rent-stabilized apartments) with some inevitable law of nature, the News concluded “the state legislature must scrap rent regulation [because] about 1 million apartments have been removed from the open market over the years through rent stabilization. Which creates an artificial shortage.”

Nonsense: New York City has had an acute housing shortage since the 19th century, and rent regulations are a response, not a cause.

The next day, the New York Post chimed in, with “The Eternal ‘Emergency’,” rewriting history with a bold stroke and saying, “If the 20th century taught the world anything about markets, it’s that they work best when officials steer clear.” Really? Is that truly the lesson of the multibillion-dollar savings and loan scandal of the ‘80s? Of airline deregulation? What about 1971-1974, when New York under Gov. Nelson Rockefeller imposed vacancy decontrol, leading to the deregulation of over 400,000 apartments in three years, a decrease in maintenance, and an inflation of rents which continues to this day? Vacancy decontrol was such a disaster that the Legislature was forced to pass the Emergency Tenant Protection Act of 1974, in which it stated that “preventive action by the legislature” (i.e., rent regulation) is necessary “to forestall profiteering, speculation and other disruptive practices tending to produce threats to the public health, safety and general welfare.” (The current rent-stabilization system dates from the ETPA.)

It is clear that Mortimer Zuckerman, the wealthy real-estate developer who owns the News, and Post owner Rupert Murdoch, the even wealthier multinational media magnate with a reactionary political agenda, are following their class interests. They are ignoring the reality documented in their own news pages: That hundreds of thousands of families—low, moderate and middle-income—cannot afford existing rents, while owners’ profits are at an all-time high.

“Myth” is a polite word for the bogus arguments put forth by the real-estate industry in pursuit of their limitless appetite for profit. “Lies” would be more accurate. During the 1997 fight over renewal of the rent-stabilization law, which ended with numerous weakening amendments, real-estate spokesmen actually said that ending rent regulations would cause rents to go down. Really? Is that what they were spending millions of dollars to accomplish? Who is kidding whom?

Calling the rent laws “a vestige of World War II,” as the Post does, is like dismissing the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution—enacted to guarantee due process and equal protection of laws to the freed men and women of the South—as a Civil War relic, notwithstanding the fact that its promise is still not fulfilled. The biggest reason rent regulations have not accomplished their intended purpose of keeping rents affordable is that people like Mayor Giuliani and Gov. Pataki—hostile to the very laws they are sworn to enforce, and heedless of the plight of the residents they are supposed to protect—have appointed like-minded hatchet men to the executive and administrative agencies charged with implementing them.

The “poor tax,” or low rent supplement on apartments renting below $500 a month, is a case in point. Imposed with slight variation throughout the first seven years of the Giuliani administration, it has contributed to the loss of more than 200,000 low-rent apartments—more than half the supply—since 1993. But that is not a flaw in the rent laws themselves. With the rent laws facing expiration again in 2003, time is running out for tenants to wake up. We must use our votes intelligently in 2001 and 2002 to elect people who will ignore the temptation of real-estate contributions, and enforce the rent-stabilization law and the Emergency Tenant Protection Act for a change. We have nothing to lose but our homes.