Actually, I was talking about rent control and, yes, I know the difference between rent control and rent stabilization. I don't have a huge problem with the lat

Actually, I was talking about rent control and, yes, I know the difference between rent control and rent stabilization. I don't have a huge problem with the latter; it's a much better system. If RS were made uniform across the city, I wouldn't consider that such a bad thing. Only about 2% of apartments are rent controlled, but when the vacancy rate in Manhattan is regularly below 1%, that makes a huge difference. There's a fallacious argument people make that, if only 2% of people have RC apartments, they're only responsible for a +2% markup on New York rents. That implicitly assumes the demand elasticity for housing is exactly 1. Not so. This is a bad assumption. Consider the oil crisis of 1973, which established that a 5% drop in oil supply can cause prices to go up 5x or worse. The same happens with housing in urban areas: small discrepancies in availability can have huge effects on price. Rent stabilization is a lot better and fairer because normal people actually have a chance of getting it, and because it's a more reasonable system. It would be even better if whatever schema were applied to New York were applied uniformly, but RS is a much better and fairer system than RC. I maintain the position that RC does an extreme amount of damage. If the demand-elasticity for New York housing were 1, it wouldn't, but it's much higher. Also, I have no problem calling rich people who exploit a system that was designed to help working-class people, at the expense of everyone else who has to pay these insanely high rents, "cockroaches", especially given that they usually break the law in doing so. My problem isn't with legitimate RC beneficiaries who couldn't afford to live in New York otherwise, and who probably comprise a small fraction of 2012 RC-holders, but with well-connected marketing directors making $200,000 per year and alimony socialites who pay $350/month for prime apartments while the rest of the city gets shafted. (For the record, New York landlords, as a class, would probably lose if RC were abolished, because it's quite likely that the free-market demand elasticity of housing is much greater than 1. Individual landlords who had RC tenants would gain, but landlords with no RC tenants would be getting less rental income, and the overall effect on landlords as a class would be reduced income because the artificially high rents paid by non-RC tenants would plummet.)