Left-wing mayoral candidates and a newly launched “housing justice” group are promising a multiyear rent freeze on the city’s nearly 1 million rent-regulated units. That’s more than half the rental apartments in Gotham. It’s a cynical political strategy: Pander to a block of single-issue voters almost too large to resist — and capture the mayoralty.
Actually implementing that freeze would turn the entire city into a slum, with dilapidated, abandoned buildings and thousands of occupants forced to live in squalor because their apartments are no longer maintained.
It could happen. In New York City, occupants of rent-stabilized apartments — about 1.7 million people living in about 980,000 units — outnumber residents of unregulated apartments. If these rent regulation beneficiaries are mobilized as single-issue voters, they…
