Albany Housing Madness

Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal — chief of the Housing Committee — got hers. And she’s gonna make damn sure no one else gets theirs.

Rosenthal won the equivalent of the New York Powerball: She inherited a rent-stabilized Upper West Side apartment from her parents. She makes $154,000 a year, and though we don’t know exactly what her rent is, it’s likely only about $2,000 a month, a fraction of the going rate.

Almost half of city apartments are rent-stabilized and, much like Rosenthal, the tenants — and the children of those tenants — never want to leave. New York City’s vacancy rate is 3.1%, the lowest in the nation.

That’s why new rents are so high. It’s scarcity. The average one-bedroom apartment goes for $3,648 a month — and even at that eye-popping price, the line for tenants would be down the block.

In short: We need more housing. Gov. Hochul and Mayor Adams, to their credit, have a solution: Commercial real estate cratered during the pandemic, so make it easier for landlords to convert those buildings into apartments.

But Rosenthal and other Albany Democrats are standing in her way. “I’m not that worried about non-affordable housing, actually,” she told Adams administration officials. “People who have means can buy, rent anything they need in this city.”

The only way she’ll back a bill, she suggests, is if the owners of those buildings are forced to make all the new apartments “affordable” — that is, even more rent-stabilized units. This is, of course, a money-loser for those building owners, since conversion wouldn’t be cheap. Many would reject such a deal: They’d do better to just let their buildings sit empty.

If Albany would just get out of the way, the market would do its work. By increasing the overall supply of housing, the vacancy rate goes up, competition for apartments decreases — and the average new rent drops, across the board. We’d have good new middle-class housing in the city.

But no. Rosenthal would rather maintain a system where the housing stock never rises. That the only way it’s affordable to construct a new building is to erect skinny towers full of luxury condos that are empty most days of the year.

And the only ones in apartments they can afford are those who were lucky to be born into them, or to win a lottery that has worse odds than being struck by lightning. It is a sclerotic way to run a city. The only way to a housing market that’s vibrant and fair is not by controlling rents but by letting supply grow to meet the demand. Let them build. Let them convert. Make it so landlords go begging for tenants, and not vice versa.

Stop standing in the way of the New York dream, Linda Rosenthal (& Co.). Let others have the chance at the life you have.