Should New York abolish rent control?

My father lived in New York from 1986 to 1989, working at Goldman Sachs. His first real apartment was a studio in a bad neighbourhood with one window, "and not a good one." He paid $1,100 a month.

One of his good friends was the son of one of the highest paid partners at the firm. The family had an entire floor of a pre-war building on Gramercy Park, one of the most pristine addresses in Manhattan. My father remembers six bedrooms and a key to the private park. The apartment was rent controlled. They paid about the same as he did for the studio.

"We were laughing," he told me. "The rent control is surely benefiting those who need it most."

That story is the whole debate in one building. Rent control does what it promises for the person inside the apartment. The question is who that person is, and what happens to everyone outside.

What rent control is

Rent control started during the Second World War, when housing was short and the government wanted to stop rent gouging. The war ended. The policy did not.

Today New York has two systems. Rent control covers a small number of tenants who have lived in the same apartment since 1971. Rent stabilization is the big one. It covers about one million apartments, roughly 45% of the city's rental housing, in buildings with six or more units built before 1974. In both, the rent can only rise by a limited amount each year. A 2019 law made it much harder for landlords to take apartments out of the system.

This makes it one of the largest interventions in any rental market in the United States.

What it gets right

It lowers the rent. A 2025 review of the research found that regulated apartments consistently rent far below comparable market apartments in American cities.

It also keeps people in their homes. Many New Yorkers spend 30 to 50% of their income on rent. A family that is not forced to move every time the rent jumps keeps its school, its job and its neighbours, and the city benefits from that stability along with the family.

If the policy delivered this to the people who need it, I would defend it.

Who gets the benefit

Two Wharton economists, Joseph Gyourko and Peter Linneman, measured who gained from rent control in New York. Tenants in controlled apartments received a benefit worth $2,439 a year on average, or 27.2% of their income. That is a very large subsidy. It did not go where you would expect.

My father saw the same thing from inside. "The people who were really in need rarely got them," he said. "They rarely ended up in the hands of those who needed it most."

Nobody moves

When an apartment costs a fraction of its market price, the tenant never gives it up. "It was so far below market that they would never turn over," my father said. "Whoever got it the first time, they just keep it forever."

He knows because he was one of them. In his last year in New York, a friend who was buying a place of his own offered him a rent-controlled brownstone on 84th and West End: three stories, two bedrooms, two working fireplaces. The market rent would have been $4,000 to $4,500 a month. He paid about $1,130. "Are you kidding me? I'll take it," he said. "And I benefited."

Apartments like these were passed between friends and family. When one did come up, it often took what people called key money: a side payment to whoever was handling it. Tenants who moved away kept paying the low rent and sublet the apartment to someone else. None of this is what the policy was written to do.

Less housing for everyone else

The harder cost to see is the housing that disappears. A Stanford study of San Francisco found that landlords covered by rent control cut the supply of rental housing by 15%, by converting buildings to condos or redeveloping them. With fewer apartments to rent, rents across the city rose by 5.1%.

San Francisco is not New York. But the incentive is the same. A landlord who cannot raise the rent has less reason to maintain the building, and a developer has less reason to build one. The tenant inside is protected. The person looking for an apartment pays more.

The Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck put it more bluntly: "In many cases, rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city, except for bombing."

Why it survives

Most New York households rent, and more than two million people live in stabilized apartments. The people who benefit from the policy are a large share of the people who vote on it. That is why a policy can last eighty years after the emergency that created it.

So, should New York abolish it?

Not overnight. Too many people have built their lives around these rents, and removing them at once would cause real harm.

But I do not think it should stay as it is. Rent control lowers the rent for whoever got there first, and whoever got there first is often not who the policy was meant for. It freezes people in place, invites side deals, and leaves less housing for the next person.

My father's verdict after living inside it: "It's nice in concept, but commercially in practice it has rarely worked."

I agree. New York should reform it toward the people who need help, phase out the parts that reward luck and connections, and make it easier to build. The goal was always affordable housing. Rent control is one way to try for that, and the evidence says it is not a good one.