If you want to know what Boston’s housing future could look like in five years, just look to New York City.
Since the 2019 “Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act” tightened rent-stabilization rules, an estimated 50,000 apartments across the five boroughs now sit empty — “ghost apartments” that landlords cannot afford to renovate and re-rent because the legal rent doesn’t even cover operating costs, let alone the price of a new kitchen or bathroom. That’s roughly 2.5% of the entire rental stock sitting dark in a city where the vacancy rate is already a crushing 1.4%.
One Manhattan landlord recently described the math on a Gramercy-area studio: after decades of below-market rent, the unit needed $50,000 in renovations. The 2019 laws allow him to permanently add only about $350 to the monthly rent for that work — pushing the legal maximum to roughly $1,230. Meanwhile, the average cost just to operate a pre-1974 rent-stabilized building in Manhattan is already $1,560 per month — and that’s before mortgage, taxes, or the new water/sewer rates. Result? The keys stay in the drawer, the refrigerator stays unplugged, and another apartment disappears from the market.
This isn’t an anomaly — it’s the predictable endpoint of price controls. To say that rent control is one of the dumbest and most useless “feel good” laws is the understatement of the century. Truth be told, there has never been one successful implementation of rent control across the nation. If there was a success story of rent control implementation in America – socialists and other non-logical thinking people would have already been touting its successes. You can look far and wide across the internet but you will never see an article on how rent control increased housing production and made housing safer or better. What you are much more likely to find is that rent control did nothing to bring down rental costs but instead made people leave their state and…