The Supreme Court on Tuesday turned down a major property-rights challenge to rent control laws in New York City and elsewhere that give tenants a right to stay for many years in an apartment with a below-market cost.
A group of New York landlords had sued, contending the combination of rent regulation and long-term occupancy violated the Constitution’s ban on the taking of private property for public use.
The justices had considered the appeal since late September. Only Justice Clarence Thomas issued a partial dissent.
Who are you proposing do this exactly? Certainly not the city, that’s government intervention. Maybe an enterprising developer, one that would see the shape of the market and realize that prices go up far faster than square footage does? You can see the same issue happening with single family housing, no developer wants to build small but affordable homes because large and expensive ones cost only two or three times as much to build yet sell for probably ten times that much, and there is always a market for them because there are always corporations and hedge funds willing to pay that much and just sit on it as an investment. With apartments the issue is actually worse because you first need to buy the property and evict all the tenants, then you need to get your plans certified by the bureaucracy (and there are several), then you need to demolish the building, and only then can you start building a new one with all those cheap apartments that definitely aren’t worth building just because the people buying or renting them can’t afford to make up the difference even with the increased number of them.