Covid Could Defeat Predatory Real Estate
A Manhattan Rental Recovery?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/19/realestate/manhattan-rental-recovery.html
Somewhat good news for renters, although still too high for most dwellers in the US capital of the predatory real estate industry, Mr. Trump far from the only beneficiary of over-pricing and under-building affordable housing and never forget, commercial, industrial and non-profit sufferers.
Rent control instituted after the first world war to serve nearly destitute veterans, later adjusted upward by rent regulation, had long-term salutary effect on NYC most deserving workers, and federal financial support programs provided incentives to builders like Mr. Trump's father, extended more generously in succeeding decades, even to recent times, subsidies and tax reductions for Trump Tower and its multiple kins along with luxury complexes such as Hudson Yards and dozens of less glamorized.
Covid-19 is often described in warlike terms and in the best of outcomes could lead to less costly construction for all building types, reduction of giveaways to campaign contributors, tax zeroing of adroit games-players, diminution of half-vacant luxury buildings and tightening of contractor-enriching, billionistic, never-ending, profligate, featherbedding, ill-maintained infrastructure.
Public revenue has been sapped by this disease war and could force a dramatic change in how its distributed and wasted on the wrong kind of physical, social and environmental conditions which has allowed a few to gain at the loss of many so vividly displayed by the sickening architecture of the heap.