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Comment by anovikov | Hacker News Reader

From the article it seems like that "current tenants don't want the building to be improved at all so it won't become more attractive to new tenants and current ones get priced out". Looks like inverse NIMBY, NIMBY for tenants? Sad.

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Current tenants won’t be priced out because the apartments in question are under rent control. Tenants sometimes want to move, however, but if they do they will lose their below-market-rate rent. So, they instead sublet their apartment to someone else and keep the difference in value. This is a violation of their rental agreements, but if the landlord doesn’t find out they don’t see a problem. Facial recognition and other technologies help landlords identify these tenants who are gaming the system in this way. The tenants gaming the system obviously don’t like that.

Then maybe the very existence of regulated rentals is the problem that should be fixed. It's little but bending of market, Soviet Union style, which naturally creates abuses. Commonplace in Europe especially in Nordic countries, where a net worth of a typical family is mostly the value of their regulated rental contract stretching from 1950s, which they sublet and make sometimes more than their entire income.

This is the root of the issue; smaller landlords can find out that subletting is happening because they only have one or two properties, and may even live in one.

Massive landlords can't do that, because they have thousands of tenants; but facial recognition and computers could flag the ones to be interested in, and then they hire the private investigators.

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