nts are unsuccessful. Ansel Sharp writes, “Today in New York City, for example, it remains popular for those seeking rent-controlled housing to daily scan the obituaries looking for recently freed-up space” (68). Of course, it was not the original intention of the local government but this is the inevitable outcome of price control.Secondly, the price control in New York City fails to satisfy the needs of those who are supposed to benefit from it. As a new housing unit becomes available, landlords try to make as much profit as they can. Profit could be either in terms of money or in terms of personal satisfaction. For example, it is obvious that if two families are willing to rent the same apartment, landlord will prefer a family that has a stable income and maybe no kids or pets to a young family with kids and one of the parents is unemployed. In terms of monetary profit, a housing shortage will lead to under-the-table payment to landlord for the privilege of a new lease. We have to consider, that people who gain from rent controls are those who already had a rented apartment before the controls were put into effect and who did not move after become effective. However, even these people, who already benefit from rent control, become prisoners of their own apartment. They are afraid to leave their apartments because it means being thrown into the market, where prices may be three or four times as high for an almost identical apartment. Many examples from real life demonstrate that some tenants could hardly be considered as those whom the government intended to help. In the letter to the New York Daily News, mentioned in the William Tucker’s article, a woman wrote the following: I recently moved to New York and I pay almost $1,200 a month for a nice little apartment on the lower East Side. . . . Still, when I found out at a tenants’ meeting that 30 of the building’s 34 apartment re...
