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Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

I had a rent controlled apartment in Midtown for ~$1300/mo. It's the apartment I grew up in and I finally got fed up and left two years ago.

The landlord put giant holes in my floor to get access to some pipes and wouldn't fix them for over a year.

After leaving the landlord tried to bill tens of thousands of dollars to bring the apartment up to their current standards -- even though we'd been in there since 1970 and the landlord never spent a cent on modernizing the apartment along the way. 100% of the renovations and upgrades we did ourselves. The apartment was left in great condition.

I completely agree with you that it's a trap. The place made me completely miserable and even though at the end I finally earned decent money to leave, I chose to leave the city entirely.

Best decision of my life.

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> rent controlled apartment in Midtown for ~$1300/mo

> landlord tried to bill tens of thousands of dollars to bring the apartment up to their current standards

> landlord never spent a cent on modernizing the apartment along the way

Surely you see that these are directly connected. With an increasing cost of living and a legally fixed profitability per month that isn't going up over time nor keeping up with inflation, from the landlord's perspective, there's little to no incentive for them to fork over cash they never got from the apartment to put back into it. At that point the only incentive is to hold onto the property itself and wait for its value to increase while deducting depreciation, and perversely, they are incentivized to make you as uncomfortable as possible since they cannot raise the rent on the unit until you move.

It's my opinion that if we want rent control, there should be a cap on the amount of time that ends sooner than "on death", especially if you're not old. (For old people who are basically living in the last unit of their lives, it makes sense to me to rent-control those).

Sure. But also Land Value Tax.

> Surely you see that these are directly connected. With an increasing cost of living and a legally fixed profitability per month that isn't going up over time nor keeping up with inflation, from the landlord's perspective, there's little to no incentive for them to fork over cash they never got from the apartment to put back into it. At that point the only incentive is to hold onto the property itself and wait for its value to increase while deducting depreciation, and perversely, they are incentivized to make you as uncomfortable as possible since they cannot raise the rent on the unit until you move.

Sure and we also stayed and maintained the building and the landlord's property through the 70s and 80s when New York was a cess pit. My neighborhood was famous for petty crime and was full of pimps, street hookers, bums and scammers -- New York was half empty compared to now.

My landlord still had their property because of tenants like us who stayed when life in NY was grim. I was just around the corner from a building famous for the landlord trying to burn the tenants out (The Windermere).

Also what the landlord was doing by not completing the repair was illegal. Fineable. Slumlordish. Having a 2' round, 1' deep hole in the doorway of my bathroom floor is a massive safety issue. You're saying my landlord shouldn't be required to repair it because of incentive? If I fell in their hole and hit my head on the toilet and died, they would have a multi-million dollar liability on their hands.

The commenter and your landlord would have got along swimmingly.

Anyone who thinks that landlords can or should be expected to pay for repairs from thin air would not get along with me, true. It's tough being a realist adult instead of a fantasy-prone child, I guess

> You're saying my landlord shouldn't be required to repair it because of incentive?

I'm saying the landlord shouldn't be expected to lose money on a unit. That's really not a drastic thing to expect, unless you are an entitled child who simply expects things to be given to them.

You were living in a rent-controlled apartment and your non-rent-controlled neighbors were likely paying double, triple or more what you were paying. Your expectation of even more beyond the privilege of living in an area that you should have been paying many times more for, is astonishing to me. You have CLEARLY never owned any kind of property, either to live in or rent out. That means there's this entire segment of reality that you have zero exposure to which is tainting your worldview with falsities about what owning property is like.

This reminds me of a story a lawyer friend told me about one of her coworkers. They all work for a nonprofit but this one coworker demanded to be paid more, based on nothing. Complete unrealism. shrug.gif

One day you should try buying any property at all, and try renting it out at cost while also still doing all the paperwork and having to eat the bills that continue to flow (such as mortgage) even when it's vacant. Then, also spend tons of time going to court to attend to frivolous lawsuits made by slightly-crazy tenants.

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