Monkeys vs. NYC landlords is evolution as usual.
Dangit. I was going to say something about AI but I keep hearing people whine about the NYC rent freeze. Here’s my take.
The smartest landlords want freedom to benefit from rising demand and charge higher rents, and control who occupies their property.
(They love control.)
Tenants (like me) want to prevent displacement; this is my home after all, my neighborhood.
Of COURSE I’d vote to stop how fast scarcity can get monetized against my LIFE.
My roots, my routines, my street.
There’s this false picture being painted by the owner types.
They act like the freeze rewards moochers, hurts supply, and rots the buildings. (And that I’m dumb for not knowing this.)
They insinuate that it’s punishing the virtuous productive people, and that the low quality people are holding progress back.
Like a mob of blue-haired melodramatic theater nerds that doesn’t get Econ 101.
Their favorite line is how my vote actually HURTS ME.
That I’m too naive and virtue-signaling to see how the freeze makes it worse for the people it aims to help.
I’ll be honest, though. If we don’t freeze rents for the next two years, I’d be fucked.
Possibly permanently. Chain reaction.
I need this window to catch up. Many are in the same boat.
Plus, I really, really don’t want to move.
My whole life is here.
Owners will be fine.
With all the whining I know they will be.
Two years is not a big deal and if it really gets disastrous it can be fixed and adjusted.
The risks of demise or decay are exaggerated.
It’s really more a basic principle thing.
Like an Ayn Rand philosophy thing.
Deeply philosophical, ethical conflict, not an objective equation.
Economics can model and predict but it can’t tell us what matters.
Property rights are great. Progress. Love it. Free market. Fine. Free-ish, anyway.
But I also value home, continuity, stability. There’s something American about those things, too.
Uprooting people sucks.
We still matter, even if we can’t win a bidding war against investors and gentry.
We breathe life into this city.
Market efficiency is not God.
It misses the beautiful details. And maybe God is in those details. ❤️
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.
But I know bullshit when I see it.
The law of the jungle did not privilege you this time.
Sometimes capital wins, sometimes democracy wins.
That 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: just cut the b.s. and take the L.
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.