Theft at the Public Till
allowing larger increases when a new tenant moved in. Unfortunately, that gave landlords a financial incentive to drive out sitting tenants. To prevent such abuses, legislators had to make evictions almost impossible. Rules that make evictions difficult usually protect all tenants, good and bad. Protecting bad tenants hurts not only landlords but good tenants. Because New York City took forever to evict tenants who failed to pay their rent, landlords' revenue fell. That forced many landlords to cut services. Because they could not evict tenants who sold drugs, robbed their neighbors, or treated their building as an oversized dumpster, many landlords gave up trying to run a respectable building and settled for renting a dump. Thus while rent control did little to lower poor tenants' rents, it my well have reduced the number of cheap apartments in which the landlord tried to keep the building safe and presentable. There is one other effect of rent control that most analysts ignore, which is the way it poisons relations between landlords and tenants. In a normal housing market, tenants who do not like their landlord simply move. But when rent control keeps a city's rents artificially low, demand for housing soon exceeds the supply, and vacancy rates fall almost to zero. Meanwhile, many landlords cut back maintenance and services, making tenants unhappy. But these unhappy tenants cannot simply move, because there are no vacant units nearby, or none at prices comparable to what they are now paying. No matter how unhappy they are, therefore, tenants stay and fight. Since landlords cannot evict aggrieved tenants, they fight back. In due course landlord tenant warfare occupies a large portion of everyone's time and energy. As I noted reform is usually complex, and first order solutions may not work very well. Our belief in black and white can lead to obscure and perverse discrim- ination. No one has suggested the mother on social security suffers from "dependency," yet everyone seems concerned about dependency when it comes to welfare. There is no rational public policy basis for treating families in essentially identical circumstances in such radically different ways. It was the very same act-the Social Security Act of 1935-that created both these income maintenance programs. The only real difference between "survivor" and "welfare" families, then and now, is the imprimaturs of the father. The
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