Bloodletting was a brutal procedure that sought to cure the sick by draining them of the very fluid they needed to survive.
After 2,000 years, scientists finally exposed this archaic practice. Studies in the early 1800s showed bleeding people was harmful and eventually it was abandoned.
Which brings us to the Rent Emergency Stabilization for Tenants Act.
The REST Act gained some traction in the Assembly last legislative session and will be back in 2027, pushed by socialists and DSA-fearing progressives. It would create more pathways for New York localities to enact rent stabilization: The eviction rate, homelessness and other metrics would become valid excuses for rent caps.
The bill says these statistics can “demonstrate a locality’s lack of housing availability.”
Well, yes, but rent regulation doesn’t improve housing availability. Like bloodletting, it makes the problem worse, and the patient never recovers.
Look no further than New York City, the epicenter of rent stabilization with nearly 1 million regulated units. It has the lowest vacancy rate in the nation. For low-priced, rent-stabilized units, it’s under 1 percent — effectively zero.
Rent stabilization was supposed to be temporary but became a self-fulfilling prophecy, keeping availability low for generations. Tenants with permanently low rents, guaranteed lease renewals and succession rights don’t move, even if they want to. Their rents are cheap and similarly priced apartments are all occupied — for the same reason.
As a result, if people somehow lose their rent-stabilized unit in New York City, it could take them months or years to find another one. Some end up in a homeless shelter.
The REST Act makes the shelter population a trigger for rent stabilization, which in turn pushes the shelter population up — a classic negative feedback loop that would trap cities and towns in rent stabilization forever.
That’s the point of the bill — not to solve housing emergencies, but to declare them across the state, then perpetuate them. Think Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Its Assembly sponsor is Sarahana Shrestha, a Democratic Socialists of America leader in the Hudson Valley. Senate sponsor Brian Kavanagh is retiring, but another senator will pick up the bill in January.
The bill would also make the current threshold for localities to declare an emergency — sub-5 percent vacancy — easier to achieve. Vacancy rates would be artificially lowered by deeming buildings to be 100 percent occupied if their owners don’t answer a survey.
New York City’s vacancy rate is not quite the lowest in the world, but only because just over half of its rental units are free-market. Stockholm’s is lower, for example, at 1.3 percent. It’s not that Swedes like long, dark winters. It’s because rent control there is even stricter.
Home Finder says of Stockholm: “In the most sought-after inner-city areas, vacancies are practically zero.”
Many Swedes join the public queue for Stockholm apartments on their 18th birthday, the first day they are eligible, in the hopes of getting a unit before turning 30.
“Waiting times can be up to 10-15 years before you find a decent apartment,” one local website says. The average is nine years.
Have economists revealed the harms of rent control the way scientists did with bloodletting? Yes, of course. It’s in every Econ 101 textbook.
But doctors’ bleeding of sick patients continued for nearly a century after its dangers started coming to light. Rent regulation could be a plague in New York for a while before our politicians emerge from the Dark Ages. If they ever do.
Read more
It’s official: Rent control is about wrecking apartments
Landlord does the math on his vacant apartment
Policy Pro: Real estate players, lawmakers face off over housing at Somos
