[gridaphobe]

> sensible reforms to tenancy laws that protect the vulnerable while not making it impossible to build new housing.

The author also addresses this point, or rather exposes it as a non-issue.

> One common belief, even in many liberal circles, is that the cause of these outrageous rents and prices is the very government intervention that was intended to ameliorate them: rent regulation. This notion might have some validity if, say, rent regulations in New York stifled construction. But they don’t. New buildings in the city are not subject to rent control and never have been.

[jhj]

When as a NYC renter it is impossible to live in near half of the rental housing stock at any price due to de facto permanent tenancy, this only pushes up the price of the housing that is possible to rent (the exempt buildings). Instead you get people in their 20s, 30s and 40s living in market rate apartments carved into multiple illegal bedrooms, places without a certificate of occupancy, illegal conversions and other shady situations.

Rent regulation help defines the price point of the new buildings, and many of the same tenants living in rent regulation are the constituency fighting for downzoning and against new construction. Rent regulation also contributes to mansionization and other reduction of housing stock.

At least we have as-of-right development of some kind unlike SF, albeit to ludicrously low zoning limits in many places. Instead, hundreds of thousands of people spend hours every week commuting under neighborhoods in Manhattan that are full of 4- or 6-story buildings when they should really be 20- or 30-story buildings that the commuters can live in instead (the Villages, I'm looking at you). It's impossible to tear down a building with permanent rent regulated tenants and build a higher one without massive buyouts; the buyouts raise the price for any new housing that gets constructed in its stead. Instead, you only get sufficient new construction in places like Williamsburg, LIC, Jamaica and the far west side is because there isn't as much political pushback from such permanent tenants in place.

[andrewjl]

That's not even close to showing it as a non-issue.

I'll share one example, what happens if a landlord of an older / aging building filled with rent-controlled tenants wants to tear it down and replace with newer and denser construction? Can they just evict the tenants? If not, then that parcel of land is effectively unbuildable. Multiply that by how much rent controlled housing NY has (quite a bit) and it's not difficult to see how it impacts creating of new housing.