A Stitch in Haste

How is this not a racist statement?

The Rent Guidelines Board recommended increases between 2 and 4.5 percent for one-year leases and between 4 and 7.5 percent for two-year leases at a preliminary vote last month. That's a pinch many New Yorkers say will be hard to take.

"Minorities can't afford that," said Lakisha Brown, 29, a single parent who pays fully half her income for a two-bedroom apartment in Harlem.

So all minorities are poor, and all whites are rich? (Or, alternatively: All renters are minorities and all landlords are white?)

If rent regulation is going to exist, then let's at least be accurate about what it represents: counterproductive warm-fuzzy-feeling politics that violate every principle of elementary economics and do more harm than good. Race has nothing to do with it. That's about the only nice thing one can say about it — it's an equal opportunity disaster.

More:

"If the board adopts the newly proposed rates, the housing crisis will be exacerbated," said City Council Speaker Christine Quinn.

Never mind that rent regulation — implemented shortly after World War II — was crafted as a "temporary" ameliorative to a "temporary" crisis. But, of course, it is generally impossible for a politician or bureaucrat to accept the possibility that a "crisis" is ever over. No matter what happens to New York's housing market, demographics or economy, there will always be malcontents who insist that there is a "crisis" that demands government intervention. It's part of a politician's DNA.

Still more:

"It makes it almost impossible," said [a housing activist], who noted that the city's affordable-housing stock has diminished in recent years. "A health emergency or a job loss means that they will very quickly fall behind on the rent."

What the malcontent doesn't tell you, meanwhile, is that under New York rent regulation, a landlord may have to wait up to six months before he can begin an eviction procedure against a deadbeat tenant. An amoral rent-regulated tenant can, as result, pay rent whenever she feels like it, not when it's actually due. Alternatively, every rent regulated tenant could, if they so chose, simply get five month's rent free. Nice "housing crisis" if you can get it.

Remind me again who's "exploiting" whom?