What They Demand...

Ponder the plight of the typical Manhattanite. The average rent on that long and skinny stretch of island is $4501 a month. That chunk of change will get you, on average, 704 square feet of living space. Shoe box, meet postage stamp.

NYC is also, of course, chronically short on housing, especially for lower income people. This shortage isn't for politicians' lack of trying, of course... but what they've been trying (for decades) is precisely why there's a shortage. A combination of draconian rent control laws, "affordable housing" hostage-taking every time a developer tries to build, and weaponized zoning and building codes not only make construction a fraught process, they preserve run-down and ramshackle buildings that could be razed and replaced with more height and more units (knock down a hundred year old six-story walkup, replace it with a modern fifteen story building, and you've increased stock by 150%).

Recent rollbacks of modest reforms (ably detailed by Francis Menton at Manhattan Contrarian) make things even worse. Since landlords' ability to recoup capital investments were restricted by those rollbacks, there are 43,000-60,000 units sitting vacant because it's economically unviable to make them usable.

Of course, "tenant advocates," who I have little reservation in presuming Marxist underpinnings, declare that the landlords are greedy and/or holding the units hostage.

One outfit, the "Coalition to End Apartment Warehousing," opines that

Creating fake scarcity to raise prices is not a fair way to run the housing market.

Behold, a grotesquely ironic use of the word "market." You're all smart enough to figure out the why and what-for.

The easiest blame here is assignable to the politicians that wrote all the rent stabilization laws and recent 'reforms,' but in doing so we overlook the true sources of blame. The advocates, of course, are there in bold and italicized font, and they're the sorts who'd subconsciously or secretly be happy if nothing ever changes for the better, lest they lose their raisons d'être. The media, including all the talking heads on TV, in print, and on the Internet, should be smart enough to report and explain the damage done by rent control. But, they don't, because the third leg of the blame triumvirate doesn't want to hear it.

That third leg? The residents themselves. The people who vote for the politicians who impose and maintain rent control, tight zoning, "affordable unit" mandates, and all the rest. The pols whom they elect are simply giving them what they're asking for.

What they are asking for, in case it isn’t clear, is Other People’s Money. Convinced by a combination of the cynically exploitive, the foolishly idealistic, and the just plain stupid that the only thing standing between them and cheaper rent is greed (it’s only ever the other guy that’s greedy…) and that they have a ‘right’ to someone else’s property on their terms, they see nothing wrong and everything right with using government to bend others to their will.

There's a popular meme on the Internet - offered in various forms - that reflects this phenomenon.

It is the digital age's update of an H. L. Mencken aphorism from 107 years ago,

and a validation of another bit of Mencken snark:

This phenomenon extends far beyond blue-urban housing. It’s a hard reality of politics, and given the age of Mencken’s quotes, it’s nothing new.

People who vote for politicians who promise to fix problems by applying government's heavy hand will remain disappointed in perpetuity. Most of them will keep voting for those same or same sorts of politicians, learning absolutely nothing from past disappointments, and continuing to believe the lies that they’ve been sold. Barring the occasional outlier, we’re not going to get politicians elected by these sorts who will actually fix the problems that the policies the voters demand have caused. Doing so would be Herculean, thankless, and a likely road to unemployment, given that the remedy would take longer than an election cycle to show benefit. All we can do is point all this out, as often as we can, and hope that enough of them wake up enough to change their voting ways some time in the future.

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Peter.