Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Have there been any experiments in legislating ceilings for housing prices? If so, what has been the effect? As Assar Lindbeck put it, "next to bombing, rent control seems in many cases to be the most efficient technique so far known for destroying cities." For instance, in 1970s when the Bronx was burning, a major contributing factor was New York City rent control. In some neighborhoods of the Bronx and in Harlem,…
it was easier to just walk away and let the building rot than to take any action to repair it and continue to collect rent-controlled rents. My parents and I lived in a rent-controlled apt in Manhattan in the early 1970s. Rent was $80/month. The 1973 oil embargo happened and heating oil prices went up. Oh, did I forget to mention that the $80 rent included heat?!!!! Basically things were so bad for the landlord that…
If you were a landlord, you couldn't afford to pay enough to buy your tenants out of their apartments. But massively wealthy investors and big banks could - and they did. They bought the rent-controlled apartments that were money pits for small landlords, and then paid large sums of cash (under the table) to the tenants to get them to leave. Once the tenants had left, the apartments could be easily converted back to unregulated, market-rate apartments.
Small landlords literally couldn't afford to own the buildings, because they had to spend money to operate them and received next-to-nothing in rent. So, they had no choice but to sell them to the investors and banks who were well-capitalized enough to negotiate these buyouts, resulting in the mass consolidation of real-estate by a relatively small number of owners.
And of course, the original goal of rent control (ensuring that long-time residents would continue living in the same neighborhoods) went completely out the window, because it was in their best financial interest at that point to move. And the secondary goal (providing "affordable" housing) was gone long before that
> We moved out of the city the next year. But in retrospect we should have bought our apt (for about $7,000) when the building went coop/condo.
In retrospect, you should probably have kept living there as tenants. If you were there in the early 1970s, you'd have been grandfathered into rent control, and rent control in New York (as opposed to rent stabilization) is insanely profitable for the tenants, even if you weren't offered the type of buyout that I described above.
It'd have taken you 7 years just to break even on the savings in rent by itself, but between maintenance costs (which your landlord was required to give you for free) and property taxes (easily more than you were paying in rent), you'd probably still come out ahead today if you'd just stayed on as tenants.
Of course, you'd have to live there continuously and never move, and the apartment wouldn't be yours to pass on in inheritance. But the money you'd save would be worth way more than that.