If you ever walk around the Upper West Side, farther away from the park, you'll see a ton big, tall apartment complexes. Huge ones with hundreds of families, if not more. I doubt everyone there makes the mid or high $100ks it takes to rent an apartment there now as a new resident.
It seems most tenants are middle-aged hispanics. No retired people there.
Rent control lets you have some reasonable expectation that you can plan expenses for more than a single lease term, as well as attempting to limit how much damage to the economics of the surrounding area real estate prices are going to do (it's a commodity that is hard to increase the supply of in any great quantity, and demand far outstrips supply...this probably would eventually stabilize, but it'd be quite messy in between, and probably not in a net positive way for the city).
Absent rent control, the lower bound of prices would go up, the ceiling would not go down.
Pretty vapid statement. The ceiling is whatever the arbitrary asking price is for something overlooking central park on the 100th floor of some high rise. Nobody cares about the ceiling.
The question is what does it do to the market price in general for a specific size apartment. It will cause a price decline because so many more apartments will actually be on the market. The current price is where supply is meeting demand so if you increase the supply the price will decline.
Of course it will screw up the people on rent control since they likely won't be able to afford it.
Many economists (and intro econ textbooks where this is a very popular example) find that rent controls are destructive and a distortionary influence on the housing market, and you’ve already identified one of the downsides in the increased difficulty for new residents to find a dwelling where rent control exist. However, this approach ignores the human and economic impact of home instability. Joshua Mason, an econ professor at Roosevelt University who studies the effects of rent control, puts it pretty well. "Long-term tenants who contributed to this being a desirable place to live have a legitimate interest in staying in their apartments. If we think that income diverse, stable neighborhoods, where people are not forced to move every few years, [are worth preserving] then we collectively have an interest in stabilizing the neighborhood.”[0]
[0]https://psmag.com/in-defense-of-rent-control-3cb453119116#.k...
Yes, the landlord will be mad, but for every one of them there are dozens of happy tenants.
The tenants getting a preferential rate will live there and vote/lobby to protect the system for generations. The new guy paying 3x probably came from elsewhere, and will return there shortly.