***Hello! I’m doing a Q&A on the podcast this week, so please send your questions and thinly-veiled attempts to get me to talk shit about people to questions@imightbewrong.org. If you’re a paid subscriber, please write to me from the account that you use to subscribe, because — as Martin Luther King said in his famous speech — “paid subscribers before free imbibers”.
A viral video by The Wall Street Journal’s Emma Camp argues that New York City’s rent control laws cause apartments to be left empty. Or, if not “empty”, then “stuffed with trash like a serial killer’s house that had recently been hit by an earthquake.” Here’s Emma’s entry in the economics-slash-horror genre:
This will be the rare case of me sort of knowing what I’m talking about, because I have personally renovated properties in New York City.1 The unit in the video has so many issues that just these brief glimpses make me want to vomit and cry at the same time. That floor needs to be completely stripped and leveled before it can be replaced, there is surely lead paint everywhere, and I’d be surprised if there’s a single up-to-code outlet in the entire unit. I couldn’t give a repair estimate without knowing the square footage, the remediation issues (is there asbestos?), and how many skeletons of unfortunate hitchhikers are hidden within the walls (NY code states that there can only be three!). But the owners’ claim of $120,000 in renovation costs strikes me as highly plausible.
But Twitter socialists have denounced the video as “landlord propaganda”. Here’s a representative sample of their arguments:
