A Stitch in Haste

City housing officials acknowledge that they have no hard data on the numbers of cases of harassment between landlords and tenants.

Which, of course, does not stop them from seeking to intervene in what the Washington Post histrionically describes as landlord-tenant "wars" --

"We want to give tenants the power of the law to fight intimidation," said Councilman Daniel Garodnick, one of the sponsors of the first bill, Introduction 627, which has the backing of 34 of the [New York City] council's 51 members. The issue is so contentious that Councilwoman Maria Baez of the Bronx, who introduced the rival bill, Introduction 638, to protect landlords, withdrew her support for it after an angry protest by housing activists outside her office.
...
Representatives of landlords say incidents of harassment are rare. They say that a new law is unnecessary because 10 existing laws deal with similar issues and that the state housing agency has been hearing harassment cases for years.

Are all landlords saints? Surely not. But I wonder which is the more ubiquitous problem: landlords illegally harassing tenants or tenants not paying rent on time (or otherwise violating leases)?

And keep in mind that a significant, perhaps overwhelming, proportion of these harassment allegations (including the false ones that no doubt exist) are in reference to rent-regulated apartments. When the government, by negating property rights, creates a powerful incentive to evict a tenant paying a minuscule fraction of a market rent (the eviction allows the rent to rise at least a bit with the next tenant), then who can claim to be surprised when a handful of landlords cross a line that the government itself created?

Does that excuse harassment or other illegal conduct? No -- two wrongs do not make a right. But let's at least acknowledge that the precedent wrong exists -- and persists -- as a matter of public policy.

---

Meanwhile:

The workers say their wages are trailing inflation and don't reflect the booming value of the office buildings where they clean, run elevators and staff the doors.

The backstory is a pending strike by the Service Employees International Union against the Realty Advisory Board, which represents many, perhaps most, commercial office buildings in Manhattan.

The part of that sentence that is most fascinating (i.e., most frustrating) is the citation to "the booming value of the office buildings." Why should the underlying value of the property matter to the value of the services a janitor provides? Since when do employees have an underlying claim to the value of the property on which they work?

This obfuscation -- best reflected in the insolent attempt by some malcontents to replace the word "stockholder" with the gobbledygook term "stakeholder" -- blanks out the fact that property values reflect entrepreneurship and risk-taking, the return to the factor of production called "ownership," just as wages are the return to the factor of production called "labor."

If workers want to share in the "booming value" of office buildings, then let their unions take equity stakes in the properties. Earn a share in the reward by taking on a share of the risk. After all, wasn't the end goal of socialism always for workers to own the means of production?

Maybe they should actually give it a try sometime -- though they may be surprised by what they learn.