I don't think it is just rent control. You should know if you have a degree in Economics that if you release rent-control apartments to the market, they will se

I don't think it is just rent control. You should know if you have a degree in Economics that if you release rent-control apartments to the market, they will seek the highest price they can fetch, but after a spike, the introduction of these apartments would dilute the market a bit. How much, I can't say, but certainly better than with rent control. And if you are from NY, you should know the difference between rent-stabilized and rent-controlled apartments. I have friends who had a rent-controlled loft in Tribeca for over 30 years way before Bobby DeNiro and company stepped in. My friends were both better off than I with one friend's parent subsidizing her to the tune of $20K to $30K per year many years after grad school too, so I rented in Brooklyn where I was born and raised below the poverty line. My friends were paying $875 per month at the time of exit in 2015, and it was somewhere around $450 back in the 80s even. They were able to take long vacations and return to their loft in Tribeca two or three times a year. A nice life if you can get it. I had lived in Manhattan a couple of times before, Hell's Kitchen, 4th floor walkup before all of the restaurants, and what were called 'yuppies' moved in in those days ;), but I then rented in Chelsea in a rent-controlled building, and became very good friends with about 6 of the elderly tenants. My apartment was rent-stabilized ($925/mo at first). I also befriended the landlord. He was running this and two other buildings, and he showed me the humongous boiler and the cost to trash the old one, and buy and install a new one. He knew if he fell behind, and if he didn't fix it, he could have the city come down on him and the public call him 'slumlord' for freezing elderly people in the winter. Most of the elderly were paying around $375 to $425 (1993 to 1997), and the boiler removal, new purchase and installation for one that size was going to be close to $150K. A large percentage of capital expenditure among other systems in a building this size, including two full-time maintenance men/tenants. I knew of two other couples in their thirties living illegally in their grandmother's apartments who they moved out to the burbs with their Mom & Dad. I could see both sides of the argument: The owner (don't like landlord) never tried to evict poor, old Ann, a former garment worker and WWII holocaust survivor, or the others. He looked for increases where he could get them to offset the long-term tenants paying so little. He had compassion (which is not Economics), but at the same time, he was looking at losses in this building cutting into his income. How come he has to support others and not be able to take sufficient self-interest to support himself and his family in any manner he sees fit? He knew about the others 'working the system'. Emotional arguments sway most people in purchases and social issues, and not intellect unfortunately. Elderly people wouldn't be helpless and poster children for rent control in their eighties and nineties, if they had to find more affordable housing in their forties or fifties. The problem gets extended and worsens when the root cause is ignored.