City Journal is a right wing rag whose opinions represent propaganda. There is one correct point that the 2019 law eliminating rent increases tied to capital improvements is broken. But its other points are simply not correct. Vouchers are not a like for like replacement for stabilization. Like work and other gates applied to SNAP and similar programs, they are fundamentally broken and inhumane.
The article makes a whole bunch of points - the main one being that rent control is not a good way to address expensive housing. Are they wrong about other things besides your somewhat beside the point example? Are they wrong that "The city now has nearly 50,000 empty units"?
The fact is a fact, their diagnosis and narrative is fantasy. A fair number of the stabilized empty apartments are due to the specific points in the 2019 law that too greatly impacted the economics of stabilized apartments. Prior to the 2019 law, it was economic to operate stabilized units, but too easy to unstabilize them, hence the motivation for the law. Replacing those dynamics with section 8 is idiocy.
