New York City's most effective tool for reducing evictions wasn't new rental laws, but guaranteeing lawyers for poor tenants. This rebalanced a major power asymmetry (from 1% of tenants having lawyers to near-parity), enabling them to use existing rights and simultaneously deterring landlords from filing weak or frivolous cases in the first place.

The common belief that people oppose new housing to protect property values is likely wrong. A more rational explanation is that residents are protecting their existing quality of life from negative externalities like noise and traffic. Pro-housing arguments should therefore focus on improving neighborhoods, not shaming residents.

Price caps can devastate small-time landlords, like retirees dependent on rental income, by setting rent below their costs for taxes and maintenance. This turns the property into a money-losing asset that is impossible to sell, effectively destroying the owner's life savings and retirement plan.

Severe rent freezes can make property maintenance and ownership financially unviable. In extreme cases where an asset becomes a liability, the only way for owners to recoup their investment may be to burn the building down and collect insurance money, a perverse outcome of a well-intentioned policy.

Policies that ban landlords from performing credit checks or vetting income will have the opposite of their intended effect. To mitigate risk from potentially non-paying tenants, landlords will be forced to demand much higher upfront rents and multi-month prepayments, making housing even less affordable for responsible tenants.

Rent control policies are fundamentally flawed because they disrupt the economic incentives required to maintain and build housing. Landlords, maintenance workers, and manufacturers won't provide their services at a loss, which inevitably leads to a decrease in housing supply and quality.

Socialist housing policies can use rent control to make building maintenance economically impossible for landlords. This forced neglect creates the appearance of a 'slumlord,' providing the political and legal justification for the state to then seize the private property.

The history of rent control in New York City shows how price caps disincentivize maintenance and new construction. This leads to a death spiral of deteriorating housing stock, supply shortages, abandonment, and ultimately higher market rents for any new, uncontrolled units.

Politicians at all levels actively restrict housing supply through zoning and other policies. This is not incompetence, but a deliberate strategy to protect and inflate property values, which satisfies the large and reliable homeowner voting bloc, ensuring re-election at the expense of renters and future buyers.