Poison for NY Housing

It’s a dark horse to become law this year, but it could still happen in, say, a deal to save Gov. Hochul’s unpopular bid to override suburban zoning laws — because progressives are eager to pass the so-called Good Cause Eviction bill, and so impose universal rent control across the entire state.

And never mind that it would only make affordable housing harder to find.

On Tuesday, The Post’s Steve Cuozzo flagged the deception behind the “eviction” name: The bill’s “a Trojan Horse for imposing rent controls on the city’s 1.4 million market-rate apartments for the first time.”

State and city law limit rent hikes on about a million rent-regulated city units, but GCE would cap rent increases on market-rate apartments at 3% or 1.5% of the consumer price index, whichever is higher.

Already, 2019’s Housing Stability & Tenant Protection Act has curtailed landlords’ ability raise rents to fund needed maintenance and repairs. That leaves some 43,000 rentregulated apartments vacant because landlords can’t afford to bring them up to code.

Thanks to pandemic-era nonpayments of rent, hundreds of small landlords are now underwater as debt and operating costs (fuel, property taxes and maintenance) exceed the rent-roll income.

Hochul’s shown no inclination to back GCE, but she may look for something she can trade to pass her entire housing plan, and suburban lawmakers in both parties are dead-set against her zoning-override plans while the left hates her ideas for the city.

But GCE would put the entire state on a path to the permanent housing crisis that rent control has produced for the city, utterly crushing new residential construction — and deepen Gotham’s housing woes.

If the gov really wants to boost housing, she couldn’t do better than to push for the opposite of the progressive agenda.