The passive voice does political work: rents rise because specific people with specific power decide they should
The Rent Is Not Too High by Accident: It Is a Policy Choice, and Policy Choices Can Be Reversed
NEW YORK – There is a habit of speech in this city that treats the rent like weather. The rent went up, we say, the way we say it rained. The passive voice does a great deal of political work. It obscures the fact that rents rise because specific people, sitting on specific boards and in specific legislatures, backed by specific money, decide that they should. The housing crisis is not a climate condition. It is a distribution of power, and distributions of power can be redistributed.
Consider the basic arithmetic that every working tenant in this city already knows in their body before any economist confirms it on paper. Roughly half of renter households in New York are rent-burdened, paying more than a third of their income to a landlord, and a substantial share pay more than half. This is not a market clearing. This is extraction, operating at the scale of millions of households, every month, with the regularity of a tide, except that tides are not lobbied for.
Who the Market Serves
The defenders of the current arrangement ask us to believe that the market, left alone, will build its way to affordability. The market has been left alone, in the ways that matter, for decades. What it built was luxury towers with double-digit vacancy held as investment vehicles, while the housing that working people can actually afford was allowed to decay, deregulate, or convert. Supply matters, and a serious housing program builds enormously, but what gets built, for whom, and who owns it are questions the market answers with its wallet, not our needs.
The empirical record of the city’s own experiments points in a direction the real estate lobby prefers not to discuss. Rent stabilization did not destroy the city; it kept teachers, nurses, transit workers, and the people who make this city function inside it. Public and social housing, wherever it has been funded rather than starved, houses people at costs the private market calls impossible. The impossibility was always ideological.
The Freeze and the Fury
When the current administration moved to hold rents flat for stabilized tenants, the response from the industry was instructive. We were told the sky would fall, that buildings would crumble, that investment would flee. The reader is invited to notice that these are the same warnings issued before every minimum wage increase, every tenant protection, every public program in living memory, and to notice what actually followed each of them: the sky, stubbornly, remained.
Coverage of the housing fight has filled the city’s press for years, and readers who want the reporting behind the rhetoric can follow the tenant and housing beats at outlets like Gothamist and the accountability journalism at THE CITY, which have documented, case by case and building by building, what disinvestment, harassment, and speculation look like at the level of an actual family’s actual kitchen ceiling. The pattern in that reporting is not subtle. When tenants have power, conditions improve. When landlords have power, rents rise and repairs wait.
The Deeper Argument
Beneath the policy detail sits the question this newspaper exists to keep asking: what is housing for? The prevailing answer, enforced by law and finance, is that housing is an asset class, a vehicle for yield, a thing whose purpose is to appreciate. Under that answer, the misery of the rent burden is not a malfunction. It is the product working as designed. The yield has to come from somewhere, and it comes from the paychecks of the people who live inside the asset.
The alternative answer is older and simpler: housing is where human beings live, and a city exists for the people who make it run. From that answer flows a program, none of it utopian, all of it done before somewhere: robust tenant protections, an expanded and genuinely funded public housing sector, social housing built at scale off the speculative market, and the political will to treat the real estate lobby as what it is, an interest group, not an oracle.
Even the papers least sympathetic to this program have been forced to cover its popularity; the business press and the tabloids alike, from the New York Times to the New York Post, spent an election cycle discovering that affordability is not a niche concern but the central political fact of the city. Voters did not arrive at that conclusion by reading theory. They arrived at it by reading their lease renewals.
What Comes Next
The task now is to hold the line and extend it. Every freeze can be reversed by the next board, every protection weakened by the next legislature, unless the tenant majority that won these gains remains organized as a majority. The landlord lobby does not demobilize between elections, and neither can we. Commentary in this tradition also circulates through our sister outlets, including the humor-and-politics pages at Bohiney Magazine, because a movement that cannot laugh at its enemies has already conceded them too much dignity.
The rent is not weather. It was decided, and it can be decided differently. That is the whole argument, and this city’s tenants have begun, at last, to make it with their votes.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/