Five claims about what is wrong with rent regulations dominate most discussion of the subject in the media. Some of these myths are attempts to convince tenants that they would be better off without rent controls. Others are half-truths intended to hide that the city's biggest landlords would get a monster windfall if there were no limits on what they could charge.
Rent regulations cause abandonment.
In real life, most abandoned buildings are in the city's poorest neighborhoods, where landlords would have trouble collecting significant rent increases even if they could charge them. It would simply allow landlords to raise the rents on apartments that haven't slipped through the loopholes. If rents were deregulated, free-market competition would lower them. This is what Paul Atanasio, a Giuliani appointee to the city Rent Guidelines Board, claimed in 1995. He hung up when I asked him how this would actually happen.