In promising to sign a dumb and destructive bill to immortalize rent regulation — a step that will keep tenants who pay artificially low rents in over 1 million apartments from ever giving them up — Gov. Andrew Cuomo has basically told everyone else in New York City to go to hell. It makes it likely that no new apartment buildings will rise. It guarantees that existing ones will decay. It will make repairs and upgrades prohibitively expensive for landlords who must eke out puny profits from properties that require major reinvestment, but where they can’t charge enough rent to...
