with a boyfriend -without facing the terrors of finding another place to live. (p. 22)
Rent control in New York, says Tucker, has created a privileged class of tenants constituting about 30 percent of the tenant population who live forever at below-market rates. Everyone else who comes to the city or who leaves one family to find a new place to live, moves from a burned-out building, or otherwise has been placed unwillingly on the housing market must scramble for the rented condominiums and illegal sublets now making up the available housing market for New York City Prices for these apartments are well above real market value. Tucker points out how surprised people are to learn that the median rent in New York City is only $365. This is almost identical to that of Chicago at about $350, but the similarity ends there. Tucker notes one day when the Chicago Sun Times advertised 1,300 apartments, mostly in the pricey Loop and North Side areas, with an average rent of $590, and with 15 percent below the median. On the same day the New York Times advertised 2,600 apartments in all five boroughs at an average price of $1,300 and with only one apartment below the median of $360. The reason for this is rent control. Tucker says Chicago has a normal housing market, with a vacancy rate of six percent, and where people come and go as they please, getting what they pay for and paying for what they get. In New York, on the other hand, the prices of 30 percent to 40 percent of all apartments are held below market by rent controls, and tenants would not think of leaving these apartments. As a result, everybody else ends up facing a vacancy rate of two percent with prices up 20 to 100 percent above what they would be without rent controls. Tucker finds further that this system is besieged by corruption: "As in any decaying empire, wit, ambition, and talent are replaced by nepotism, politics, and corruption" (p. 22).
Rental housing is a...