New York Times: 110-Building Site in N.Y. Is Put Up for Sale

The proposed sale of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, two huge, mostly rent-controlled -- or, to use Times lingo, “rent-stabilized” (I wonder how the Times would like their ad rates “stabilized”) -- Manhattan apartment complexes, is covered with the Times’ usual helping of hand-wringing about the working class being driven out by greedy developers and “young well-heeled professionals”:

“We’re at about $1,400 now,” said a woman named Evelyn, who declined to give her last name but described herself as a 77-year-old retired teacher who has lived with her husband in a three-bedroom apartment in Stuyvesant Town for 43 years. “If we die, whoever comes in will pay $3,500 or $4,000. This used to be a nice middle-income place. It’s no longer that.”

What was this woman doing renting for 43 years? She didn’t think to buy a place in all that time? My guess is that she thought the rent-control gravy train would roll on forever, and she’d never have to get off.

This is the problem with all subsidies: they never solve anything, only delay having to deal with it, and when the day of reckoning does finally arrive, it is a tsunami, instead of the ripple it would have been had the subsidy never been enacted.

They also lead individuals, like Evelyn above, to choose short-term expediency over long-term security: she probably never bought her own place, even during the many real estate busts in Manhattan over the last 43 years, because her monthly payment couldn’t compete with her subsidized rent. Now, instead of owning the roof over her head, and seeing it double or triple in value, she and thousands of others like her who rolled the rent-control dice find that they came up snake eyes.