Monkeys vs. NYC landlords is evolution as usual.

I keep hearing conservatives complaining about the NYC rent freeze. Here’s my take.

Landlords want the freedom to benefit from rising demand, to charge higher rents, and to control who occupies their properties. Fair enough.

Tenants (like me) want to prevent our displacement. Or at least slow down how fast scarcity can get monetized against our lifestyle. Our roots, our routines, our neighborhood.

There’s a conflict of interest playing out, and it’s okay; competition is part of nature, which is why we have markets.

But it’s also why we have government and democracy.

Sometimes there’s a false picture being painted by some of the owner types.

They argue that the freeze hurts supply, cuts into owner and investor profits, and rots the buildings when landlords defer maintenance and repairs.

They’re right. It impacts the city negatively in some ways. There are tradeoffs for sure.

But the complaints don’t stop there. A lot of them are making it personal, political, philosophical.

For example: the idea that the freeze unfairly rewards the less productive, and interferes with the natural order of the world.

Also, the idea that my vote actually hurts me and the people that I self-righteously say I want to help.

In short, they’re saying the freeze is 1) morally unfair and unjust, 2) a crime against nature, and 3) stupid, self-indulgent and tinged with false virtue.

There’s a lot to unpack in that.

First off, if we don’t freeze rents for the next two years, I’d personally be in trouble. I need this window to catch up. (Many are in the same boat.)

Plus, I don’t want to move. My whole life is here.

So all things considered, I’m not hurting myself with this vote. The drawbacks are real, but they’re worth it. (To me.)

Some owners will lose a decent chunk of change. I don’t celebrate that. I realize some fellow liberals do, and I think that’s ugly. (A lot of what liberals do these days is strange.)

But as for owners taking a hit, I’m more like: that’s life in the big city. Nobody forced anyone to do real estate in a heavily-regulated NYC market. Democracy is part of the risk.

In my opinion, losing an investment isn’t quite the same thing as losing your home. Sure, nobody forced tenants to live in New York either. But voters treat homes differently from investment assets, and that makes sense to me.

The city will be fine, too. Two years is not that big of a deal. Plus if it gets really disastrous (which it likely won’t) there are ways for the mayor to staunch the bleed-out with policy changes.

The risks of demise or decay are exaggerated.

Most of the panties-in-a-bunchery I’m seeing from the right is contempt for market interference on principle.

A personal, ideological, ethics-related grievance.

And that’s totally fine. Different things can matter to different people.

But what insults my intelligence is when people paint a picture of what’s happening, with numbers and all, as though it’s objectively bad. If I’m not grumbling along with them, they assume it’s because I don’t have the facts or understand them.

Badness is somewhat in the eye of the beholder. That’s why we have things like democracy in the first place. Not just because we disagree on what’s the case, or what will work. But also because we value different things.

Some of us choose jobs we love even though they don’t pay very well.

Others are willing to work jobs they hate because they pay a ton.

Both types are pursuing happiness. And they both might even get it, even while prioritizing different things. Neither choice is objectively bad, people just weigh tradeoffs differently.

Economics formulas predict outcomes, but they’re less good at predicting emotional outcomes.

For that, we need to look honestly at what matters to different types of people. We’d have to define values, and even map the suffering and wellbeing ratios for both short and long term outcomes.

I’m sorry, but the modern conversation on the right still seems oddly disconnected from the explosion of research on happiness and wellbeing. Instead, they mostly just look at what people are willing to pay for and call it a day.

But that’s just one heuristic, and sure, it’s a good one. But it’s incomplete, and if it’s the only thing we look at, we’re getting a distorted picture.

We also need to look at people who spend hours taking care of a sick relative for free. Addicts willing to pay a fortune on meth. There are tons of things people care about that are hard to monetize.

GDP isn’t the final arbiter of a country’s success. World happiness metrics matter, too. And the U.S. often hasn’t cracked the top twenty.

This is why when voters support a rent freeze, you can’t just assume ignorance. Maybe they just don’t care as much as you do about the balance sheet. And you don’t care as much as they do about the sanctity of maintaining a neighborhood.

Instead of letting the free market swap out the soul of a town to the highest bidder, some of us want to regulate just how much we can treat homes like fungible investment products.

That’s why multi family is a regulated asset. Investors and landlords may see it as just a product. Voters don’t see it that way.

It’s easier to pretend that we all agree on the end goal for a city, that we all use the same moral and emotional math, but we don’t. Not even close.

Seems like that’s deeply frustrating to free market purists. The idea that some of our biggest economic and political disagreements come down to people legitimately caring about different things.

Laissez faire capitalists often want to believe that we all care about the same things, but that the left is going about getting those things in a stupid, ignorant, self-indulgent, hypocritical way.

Many on the right seem allergic to the idea that reasonable people can have equal knowledge of the facts, and equal capacity for logic, and still desire opposing policies in completely good faith.

That said, our values aren’t even that far apart.

Property rights are great. Progress. Love it. Free market. Fine. Free-ish, anyway.

Responsible citizens should be realists about what rent freezes will likely do.

But even if we understand the downstream costs of a rent freeze, it doesn’t necessarily mean we rank those costs higher than the cost of two million New Yorkers getting squeezed, many of them having to leave.

Most of us also value the concept of home, we value continuity, stability. There’s something American about those things.

We’re given the right to pursue happiness, not the right to win every time. People get fired, outbid, cheated on. It happens.

Sometimes tough decisions have to be made for the greater good. We have a process for making those decisions: democracy. Market efficiency is not God, nor is it the law of the land. It works, it’s useful, but it’s not the end all be all. It’s just a tool.

Sometimes it misses beautiful details. And maybe something of God, and something precious about the American spirit, is in those details that market efficiency tends to miss.

And don’t get me wrong. I like nature, wildness, competition. I dig the ebb and flow of strength fighting for survival.

Am I not a funky monkey girl? Is my ass not red and inflamed from time to time?

If you prick me, do I not screech?

The monkey mob won this round.

We’re stronger for now. The tenant voting bloc is taking a victory lap.

THAT is evolution. Deal with it, landlords, investors, tax payers.

Nobody forced you to be norm-core try-hard landlords in a big-girl town. Cry me a Hudson.

You resent this so intensely. You try to recast your loss as an obvious ethical breach and act like market efficiency is a sacred rule.

But there’s nothing less legit about democratic power.

Not unless you got so accustomed to money being this holy efficient measure of exchange that you mistook it for the only indicator of value.

I’m no expert on Econ nor do I want to be. I’m not going to argue about how things pencil.

The law of the jungle did not privilege the more “successful” folks this time.

Markets are one way society decides who gets what. Democracy is another. Both are competitive systems. This time, capital lost and voters won.

That doesn’t mean the system is broken.

It doesn’t make the winners communists.

Cut that out.

Also, the freeze is just two years.

If the sky falls, which it likely won’t, we can always change the rules.

I’m no huge Mamdani fan. I dislike his rhetoric on Israel.

But if the city deteriorates per the apocalyptic nonsense you’ve been spewing, Mamdani will pump the breaks.

And it’s not like “South Bronx in the 1970s.”

(I looked it up. That’s a disingenuous comparison.)

Rich guys: Stop whipping out your wounded power and waving it around disguised as objective truth.

You’re embarrassingly…not even wrong. Yes, it hurts supply temporarily. It’s not that we don’t know that, we just value different things. That’s why we have democracy.

The tradeoff of the rent freeze can actually be worth it to reasonable people. Stop pretending that’s impossible.

Ok, enough.

Bigger fish to fry, remember?

AI and IWRS-relevant subjective qualia and the empathy bridge. Coming soon.