
An actress lived for decades in this NYC apartment for $28 a month (2018) - paulpauper
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/05/14/us/new-york-apartment-rent-control-actress-trnd/index.html
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baron816
Freakonmics had a podcast the other week “Why Rent Control Doesn’t Work”:
[http://freakonomics.com/podcast/rent-
control/](http://freakonomics.com/podcast/rent-control/).

The reasoning why it doesn’t work probably won’t surprise anyone here. But in
it they talk about how the very wealthy Nat Sherman was able to pay $355/month
for a rarely used 6br apartment. That’s quite an efficiency problem.

~~~
Spooky23
They probably didn’t talk my elderly aunt, who paid a similar sum with her
$1,100/mo social security and was able to stay in her community, parish and
close to loved ones.

~~~
mikeash
There must be better ways to accomplish this that don’t result in valuable
apartments sitting empty.

~~~
door5
True -- vastly expanding public housing, with the goal of eventually
eliminating private housing. Housing should be a public good, not a commodity.
Until then, rent control is a good way of minimizing the extent to which
landlords exploit their tenants.

~~~
alexis_fr
Food should be public good, then.

~~~
door5
Also true.

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nicodds
This is really common in Italy. Some years ago there was also some politicians
involved. They rent houses of public property for an epsilon of their price.
In the palace where I live, there are families paying 50 euros/month for their
apartment (near 100 square meters)

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DoreenMichele
She had no tub, no shower and no heater. She heated it with the stove and a
fireplace. Eventually, the landlord insisted on providing her a heater. She
never used it and showered every day at the Y because she had no tub or
shower.

I have very mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand, it casts some light on housing standards from decades ago.
The amenities we expect for any and all housing were simply not expected for
all housing types.

On the other hand, by some definitions, this woman was "homeless" or at least
"inadequately housed." Her two bedroom apartment sounds a bit like a glorified
shed.

I'm stunned that this seems to not be making anyone's radar. It's the kind of
accommodations that winds up making headlines as _illegal_ and run by an
_abusive landlord taking advantage of people._

But it was presumably legal when she moved in, so people are fine with this?
While decrying SROs as unacceptable housing these days for some reason.

I think my cognitive dissonance is pretty maxed out at the moment.

~~~
nadezhda18
> abusive landlord taking advantage of people from the article: The landlord
> offered her to install a heater and she refused. From my point of view, it
> says more about her character ("I do not deserve this") than about the
> landlord. Moreover, he did install one! and she never used it!

When she moved in, it was not probably a standard feature to have one; and
after all, she did live w/o using one for her whole life (despite even having
one installed at the end).

Again, it feels it was HER choice rather than a one forced down her throat.

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macspoofing
It was a nice story with nice people.

Rent control hurts tenants, landlords and cities but in this particular case,
rent control was a benefit to this lady - letting her rent be subsidizes by
various property owners over the years - who were kind enough to roll with it
and not kick up a fuss.

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sxp62000
6 years ago I used to live in a rent-controlled studio apartment on the Upper
East Side. There was a very old woman who lived alone in the apartment above
me and one night I saw her eating out of the trash. New York is a tough place
to be.

~~~
nadezhda18
> one night I saw her eating out of the trash

this means nothing. The lady can simply have dementia or something like this
and even having a loving family and a nurse taking care of her, she still
could have eaten from trash.

This is the nature of the disease, unfortunately.

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HillaryBriss
A great story with great pictures. Interestingly, the tenant agreement from
the 1950's required the original three tenants to both pay rent and help tidy
up the building.

~~~
toomuchtodo
This isn’t that uncommon. If I trust a tenant, I’ll give them a break on the
rent if they act as a “property manager lite” for my larger (5+ units)
properties. The cost savings is always worth catching a problem early compared
to the rent you discount.

~~~
hprotagonist
i wound up living rent-free for a year or so in the mother in law apartment of
an old multi-family home this way once. The new owner wasn’t going to move in
until spring, and it was a cold very snowy winter.

Turns out, preventing ice dam damage in a lath and plaster house by keeping
the roofs clean makes your landlord like you a _lot_. As in, we exchange
christmas cards now.

~~~
lostlogin
I was paid to have a role like that. It was great while it lasted but wore
thin after a year of dealing with reoccurring problems that seemed so
obviously idiotic.

Pushing the automatic carpark gate open with the car because it wasn’t fast
enough: a couple of times a month.

Putting clothes hangers up through sprinkler heads and setting off the
sprinkler: quarterly.

Meth addicts smashing up washing machines: monthly.

Crazy people with crazy demands detailed in multipage letter: weekly.

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Kiro
I'm trying to understand the arguments for and against rent control on a
higher level (what's best for society in whole). Any pointers?

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mruts
Rent control is a scourge on our cities and people. It hurts everything around
it: the people (both rich and poor), the city, the developers, sometimes even
the people who are living in the rent controlled apartment. I don't think you
could find a single reputable economist who thinks it's anything except a
terrible idea.

~~~
Kiro
What about segregation? In Sweden most people are in favor of rent control.
They don't want the rich being the only ones who can afford living in nice
areas and let the poor be lumped together in bad areas.

~~~
Frqy3
This should be solved using public sector housing. Which you can think of as
similar to rent control as discussed in the article, except the subsidy is
made visible and direct through the tax payer funding, rather than through
being obscured.

This also gives better public control of who receives the subsidised housing,
usually a combination of needs assessment to qualify and then a queue system.

The important thing we have learned from the 70s/80s (different timing in
different countries) is to spread the public housing throughout the community,
rather than concentrate it into a single location. That is, rather than have a
large apartment building that is purely public housing, have a requirement
that a certain percentage of properties of every new development will be made
available as government subsidised public housing.

~~~
Kiro
Sounds fair but is rent control really a subsidy? The state is not paying
anything, while public sector housing would be an expense.

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thepangolino
This is hardly a new problem. It was already outlined by the current US
president in his 1987 book The Art of the Deal.

~~~
mikeash
Outlined by Tony Schwartz, surely.

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lixtra
I wonder if the IRS will hit the heirs with a huge gift tax?

EDIT: if you sell/rent something much below value it can be considered a gift.
And tax authorities regularly do so.

~~~
zdragnar
She rented, not owned. It was under rent control. Why would the estate owe the
IRS money?

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trevyn
I’ve seen rent control utterly destroy people who end up “not being able to
move” once their rent becomes severely under-market. It seems to freeze them
in time, and they tie their identity to their apartments, removing any ability
to grow as a person.

This quote from the article nearly makes me cry: “I'm not worthy of these
repairs and these improvements.”

~~~
asdfasgasdgasdg
Hrm, I dunno. It seems like a pretty good deal for the person whose rent is
controlled. I can hardly imagine that they'd (on average) be better off if
they were forced to move elsewhere, or forced to pay more. It seems like what
you might be observing is a correlated effect. That is, people who are so
dependent on rent control must have a certain amount of fragility in their
financial situation. Older people in financially tenuous positions are
understandably reluctant to venture forth and take risks, both because we
become less neuroplastic as we get older in general, and because poverty is
not conducive to risk-taking.

Now, whether rent control is good for society as a whole, I think that's a
very different question with quite the opposite answer.

~~~
mruts
I think that rent control can make you paralyzed. Unable/unwilling to pursue
new and potentially better opportunities in new places. Having a rent
controlled place makes it significantly less likely that you will take a job
in another place, even if it's paying you more.

It's the classic case of economic myopia. Maybe that new job would put you on
a career path to be a millionaire in 10 years, but you can't see anything
except how you would be losing money (by giving up your rent controlled
apartment) in the short-term.

~~~
cma
So then if we did some kind of reverse of rent control, a tax on participating
in the same community too long, we'd see radical benefits

~~~
mruts
That would disincentive investments and property ownership.

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ALittleLight
I know the article says the landlord and actress were friendly, but if I were
the police I'd look into connections between the driver of the car that killed
the actress and the landlord. I'd also want video or eyewitness testimony of
the accident.

Murdering someone in a car "accident" seems like a good method for not getting
caught. "It was an accident! So sorry!". The financial benefit to the landlord
seems 5,000 a month and people have likely been killed for less.

~~~
paulpauper
that does not make sense. if he wanted her dead he would have not waited so
long

~~~
ALittleLight
The current landlord took over in 2002 - that's 12 years. In that time he
could have first tried asking her, second tried making her feel guilty and or
befriending her to get her to leave. His financial situation could have
degraded, he could have come up with the idea or needed connection, and he
could have built up the resolve to actually do it.

I'm not saying I think it's certain, I don't even think it's more likely than
not. However, I think it's suspicious enough that it would be worth it to look
into and rule things out.

