Think of the outer layer like the rind of a fruit you don't eat. Same idea. It is there to preserve the meat and is carved off to serve.

I've lived in NYC since 2005 and have lived in multiple stabilized units and unstabilized units. There was no lottery, it was like finding a normal unit but you signed a stabilized lease. Not sure what the hell you are talking about. I can tell you with 100 percent certainty that the stabilized units were shit holes compared to the other units and that buildings with stabilized tenants were run far worse. Things were not fixed, you had to fight about heat, et cetera. The current proposed law would turn the entire housing stock into this.

As I mentioned above, it is great for existing tenants in the short term, bad in the long term, and a disaster for new tenants and landlords.

I mean that is a subset of the housing stock in NYC but not really relevant on average. This is a perpetual contract, just only one side really has power to break it.

In practice, this law is giving one side of a contract, the rentor, perpetual rights over somebody else's property and setting price controls to boot, and the other side of a contract, the landlord, no consideration at all. This does not end well at all.

And this isn't really an academic point. It's not hard to see the difference in quality of rent stabilized places vs market rate places on average. A decade plus in NYC makes that one abundantly clear. Now add in less incentive to be a landlord and build additional rental stock, less tax benefits to go along with rent controlled prices, and much more risk. This is an absolute disaster in the making

From the landlord perspective it is perpetual. The tenant has an unbound by time option to renew at a cost controlled by the state and the landlord has to accept.

So you need to separate two parts of the law. One is the inability to evict somebody without reason and a long legal fight. The other is price controls on rent.

I am not an economist, but it is pretty easy to see how price controls lower the incentive to create more rental units and could lead to making it uneconomic for landlords to maintain their property. Long term, this is terrible for both new renters and existing renters.

In the short term, it is boon to existing tenants and terrible for new tenants. Because the landlord is entering into a perpetual lease and it is harder to evict people, the bar to clear to get a place and the cost will go up. This is basic risk pricing. The risk of a perpetual lease is higher than a 1 to 2 year lease and that risk will be priced by the market.

Existing tenants should love it in the short term. You just got a perpetual lease renewal right and a price cap for free.