City Journal:

The Law They Named for Me.

Governor Cuomo’s plans to expand rent regulation—including, perhaps, repealing the Urstadt Law—will have disastrous consequences.

Governor Cuomo has announced his support for ending “vacancy decontrol,” a move that will maintain existing rent-regulation rules forever. He may also seek to repeal the Urstadt Law, which gives ultimate say over local rent regulation to the state. The call to hand control over rents to local government sounds appealing on its face. But it would amount to a deeply misguided policy failure, with disastrous consequences. I know, because I’m the Urstadt for whom the law is named.

In the early 1970s, when I worked for Governor Nelson Rockefeller as the State Commissioner of Housing and Community Renewal, he tasked me with finding a way to limit the damage done to New York’s inventory of apartments by rent regulations. These rules were—and remain—an anachronistic legacy of World War Two, when a “housing emergency” created a shortage of apartments, and prompted the federal government to restrict rent increases.

Three decades later, the rents for many New York City apartments still remained legally frozen at Depression Era-levels. By the 1970s, New York’s economy was on the skids, and more than 800,000 residents (almost all of them middle-class wage earners) were fleeing to the suburbs. The rent-control regime, combined with this flight, helped create vast, concentrated pockets of poverty in places like northern Manhattan, the South Bronx, and large areas of Brooklyn, which were hemorrhaging middle-class residents.  more here