"Here, they torture you first"

One of my favorite examples of the cost of interfering with the market is rent control. And while I've been collecting rent control stories my whole career, William Tucker's great new piece, "Taxpayers, Meet Your Tenants," has two gems I hadn't seen before:

Deprived of any chance of evicting tenants, the only thing the landlord can do is reduce services. So another layer of law is necessary saying that if landlords don't provide heat or make repairs, the tenant doesn't have to pay rent. Now the tenant has an interest in seeing things fall apart. One of the most common confrontations involved a rent-controlled tenant refusing admission to the repairman sent to fix the leaky sink. In the end, the tenant can just create his own violations -- a missing smoke alarm, graffiti in the halls. "Paying rent in New York is really optional," one landlord after another told me. "It's lucky more people don't know the law."

The stories from this netherworld sometimes sounded like chronicles from the Spanish Inquisition. One Chinese woman, whose property-owning family had been murdered by the Communists, had been running an apartment house in Harlem. After one tenant refused to pay rent for two years, she finally got an order of eviction. The tenant responded by firebombing her office. She took him to criminal court. The judge looked at the case and said, "This isn't a criminal case, it's a housing matter." Back they went to housing court. The housing judge overturned the eviction. For firebombing her office, the tenant got to keep his apartment. "I think I'm going back to China," she told me. "Over there they just kill you and get it over with. Here they torture you first." 

Comments

[fulkon]

Speaking of Taxpayers, I heard an interesting idea:

Gallup recently ran a poll that concluded that 36% of Americans had a positive image of socialism.

However, instead of polling democrats, indepentents, and republicans, I would be very interested in seeing the results when they poll taxpayers and non-taxpayers. I bet you'd get about a 95% positive image of socialism among non-taxpayers!

[TheBigHenry]

At last, an alternative to water-boarding guaranteed to succeed.