Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem isn't anything that the local government did, but what it didn't do. There are a lot of steps that could have been taken to lower the rent and property prices. For example, one measure is disallowing anyone to own property in New York that they don't live in at least 6 months plus 1 day. (The same is true of rent control, since a lot of RC people now live out of the city but keep the apartment because it'…
...disallowing anyone to own property in New York that they don't live in at least 6 months plus 1 day... Near as I can tell, this would drive up the price of rentals quite significantly. Any landlord would need to factor the risk of getting caught being a landlord into your rent. I like your second idea of punishing people who are not part of my tribe. By the way, a more realistic way to lower rent prices would be t…
Fail on my part. I meant to apply this to ownership without renting, with the intention of kicking out the damn speculators.
By the way, a more realistic way to lower rent prices would be to end rent control.
The original rent control regime (where rents couldn't increase with inflation) turned out to be a huge disaster. It left a bunch of well-connected non-productive rich white people with an arrangement better than ownership, at the rest of our expense. The concept of rent control I don't have an issue with, but the original implementation was awful.
I don't mind government interfering with the rental market if all tenants benefit. In a city like New York, government meddling is necessary because the free market fails catastrophically, as we see in these four-digit rents, but I do think the 60+ year-old sweetheart deal that some people have, just because they've been here forever, needs to be ended.