Why do people panic so much about this?<p>It has been shown time and time again that price floors or ceilings very rarely help a market be efficient. Quite the opposite usually.
I'm all for rent-stabilization going away, if two things happen:<p>1) We remove building restrictions around the city that keep new taller apartment buildings from going up. Yes, almost all of NYC is developed land, but many parts of Brooklyn, for example, are full of one and two story buildings that aren't using the space effectively.<p>2) We upgrade the mass transit systems to handle the increased population. The subway system is already strained to the breaking point, and the buses can't help enough without getting personal cars off the road to free up traffic.
The author seems very keen on rent control, but I think one should look more cool headedly at some alternatives that can achieve the same result by different means.<p>Bombing the city in particular should be considered. Bombs could be supplied cheaply by the US army, where they are plentiful, and they could achieve the same level of devastation that rent control has produced in parts of NYC like the Bronx. Of course, they are also other ways to achieve the effects of rent control, like arson, bringing back Mongolian hordes from the dead, etc.<p>What matters is that we can have an open, transparent debate about the best way to ruin the real estate stock of the city.
> After hearing through a FOIL request that it would cost the city $50,000 to deliver the building-by-building data (which implies that the city itself does have the data readily available), John, and some peers at BetaNYC, went about scraping the tax bills for NYC buildings to get the rent stabilization information out of PDFs.<p>> In this new era of open data, you should not need to know how to write a PDF scraper to find a reasonably priced place to live, or discover where you are about to lose one.<p>I'm having a hard time imagining how it would cost $50,000 to export data.
Can we just hurry up and turn all of Manhattan into luxury hotels for tourists already? It can be like Venice: 90% hotels and a few condo buildings near the park for billionaires.<p>It's very well served by public transit, so anyone who works there can commute from elsewhere.
I love posts like this that never fail to remind me that the Hacker News intelligentsia has more respect for efficient markets than it does for poor people.