After reading our case study on Pg 83 in our textbooks and doing a bit of additional reading over the internet, I decided that rent control are indeed hurting tenants in low and middle income areas and are not benefiting from the rent control. With today’s laws, “for an apartment to be under rent control, the tenant (or their lawful successor such as a family member, spouse, or adult lifetime partner) must have been living in that apartment continuously since before July 1, 1971. When a rent controlled apartment becomes vacant, it either becomes rent stabilized, or, if it is in a building with fewer than six units, it is generally removed from regulation.”(1) As more people either move out or die, apartments that are still under rent controls will continue to decline. I even found an article that stated “a tenant can pass on his lease to another. One such situation is when a tenant dies and a family member takes over the lease. The family member usually has to have resided with the tenant for at least two years prior to the death.” (2) The article goes on to talk about a particular person who has done thi,s by marrying an older man who died a few short months later. With the shortages of housing in New York, prices of rent are extremely high. Only when these apartments are no long occupied by the original tenants, will the price in the area begin to drop and will be more affordable.
“In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the Emergency Price Control Act (EPCA) which provided for a universal, nationwide price regulatory system.” (3) This then started a chain of unintended consequences that wouldn’t be seen until years after. Rent control needs to be phased out to get people with low and moderate income into homes that they can afford. I cannot understand how a person that is making $24,000 a year is going to be able to afford $1500 a month rent for an apartment that may be in substandard conditions because of rent control. I can see how if a...
