What would New York City housing, and the city as a whole, look like without rent stabilization? Today, the city’s rental market has reached stratospheric levels; rent-stabilized apartments are a crucial counterbalance, without which enormous numbers of New Yorkers quite simply would not be able to stay.

Disturbingly, as the city descends deeper into a housing crisis, landlords are keeping tens of thousands of rent-stabilized apartments off the market. The free market, in its infinite and mysterious wisdom, is incentivizing landlords to hoard a desperately needed basic good in hopes of making more money off of these apartments down the road.

The practice by landlords of refusing to rent apartments is known as warehousing, and the City reports that the number of warehoused rent-stabilized apartments jumped from about thirty thousand in 2020 to over eighty thousand in 2021 — at the exact time that news about New York City’s housing market gets evermore dire. Homelessness has reached record levels, with over sixty thousand people relying on the city’s shelters each night, and vacancy rates dropped below 1 percent for apartments costing less than $1,500 per month. By one estimate, the city needs an additional half a million new apartments to be built before 2030 just to keep up with surging demand.