Scripture is plain on this. Exodus 21:20–21:

“And if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished. Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money.”

The doctrine reads in the master’s ink. Modern law is sentimental. Modern law has lost the sentence that balanced a household — the servant is the money — and the city built a housing code on the loss.

John R. Puri writes in National Review this month that Mayor Zohran Mamdani has drained the dominion from a rent-stabilized landlord’s title: the exclusive use, the exclusive services, the right to dispose at agreeable terms. He is right that the taking is real. He is too polite to say it stings. And you are in the toll.

I own four buildings in Washington Heights. The one I want to walk you through is on 181st Street; I bought it in 2009 for $4.6 million. The roof is mine. The boiler is mine. The lobby tile is mine. The thirty-eight apartments — not mine, the code decided that — but the parts that make a building stay a building are still carried in my basement, at my margin, cheap.

Ilda is a hand on my 181st Street building. She is 64. She has worked the building 21 years. She carries the compactor’s failures down the deep staircase when it greeds up. She cleans the lobby to the inspector’s temper. The tenants think they rent a house. They rent Ilda, but the lease doesn’t say it. Never has. That’s not the lease.

The board’s frozen the rent at 0% this year. The building’s operating costs ran up 5.3%. Ilda earns $19.40 an hour. She earned $19.40 in 2019. The insurer, the fuel, the water — the whole ladder — has climbed 41% in that window. Her line hasn’t moved. That isn’t negligence. It’s the door you don’t have a ballot for.

Under 181st, there is a boiler. It had a tune-up, years ago: a man with a sour vacuum, twice a year. $1,300 a season. I cut it. The rock runs a good winter; maybe a second, and on the second it runs hot and long. Third year the heat exchanger cracks. The exchanger is $47,000. The tune-up was paying to keep things from getting to the $47,000. The ratio is 36 to 1.

I.

By their fruits ye shall know them. Mine are returns.

Hold that figure. $36 of saved maintenance for every dollar of failure I let the building carry to. The crack doesn’t file. The 4 a.m. call has no entry. The name of the tenant who left because the heat wouldn’t hold — the operating statement says her name was some part of me, but I don’t keep it. The differential is the one figure I have priced, and it is mine. I will keep it.

Widen the frame. There are a million stabilized apartments in this city, and behind each one a porter does what Ilda does — out of sight, on the line that didn’t get posted. I’m a curriculum, not a monster. I have taught this ledger nineteen times; my graduates sit in the firms that set your lease, and one of them set the operating budget for the team that runs your porter’s stair. They read the arithmetic faster than I did when I started, and I say that with the only honest pride I own. The teacher’s reward.

But you shouldn’t stop at Washington Heights. Let me show you what free looks like. In Spartanburg, South Carolina, I hold a 48-unit portfolio with no rent ceiling at all. Pearline is an occupant on that rent roll. She’s been there 6 years. She pays $890 a month in rent and $45 a month in a community maintenance fee that has maintained nothing since 2021, when I stopped replacing the HVAC filters — $180 a unit, replaced on a cycle, and a recurring line I didn’t need. The mold arrived with the filters’ absence. Pearline’s son has asthma. The medications cost $340 a month, which Pearline pays, and Medicaid covers the rest, which you pay. I keep the $25,920.

The fund managers present the figure to your pension advisor as “deferred maintenance optimization.” That’s the polite phrase. The vulgar phrase is that I stopped buying the air filter for the asthmatic child. I prefer the polite phrase — not because it is truer, but because it makes the quarterly review end sooner.

Follow the fee, not the rent. The rent is the number Puri defends. The fee is the number I keep. $45 times 48 units is $2,160 a month. The maintenance this fee is supposed to cover — the filters, the re-keys, the inspections — I perform at the minimum South Carolina requires, which in Spartanburg is what a complaint triggers. Pearline has not filed one. The lease renewal process is not friendly to tenants who file.

Quinton is Pearline with a different cut. Same building, same dominion, one door further down. I cut the re-keying in 2022 — $87 a door, 48 doors, $4,176 a year. The prior tenant’s key still worked. Quinton’s television left on a Tuesday afternoon. He filed a police report. The department has not called. The $87 is in the yield.

The filter savings: $25,920 a year. The re-key savings: $4,176. Together: $30,096. The cost of those savings falls on the tenant — the mold in her walls, the television from his living room. The yield on neglect is mine. That is not a market failure. That is the market Puri is describing.

He calls the regulation a taking. The parable calls the accumulation a law. “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” The names change. The arithmetic does not.

Here is the part I want you to learn, because it is the part that pays. The portfolio returned 14.3% last quarter. The deferred-maintenance line contributed. The joists are still holding. I haven’t priced when they won’t. The returns are in a different file. When the joists fail, the unit goes vacant. When it goes vacant, the next tenant pays a renovation fee that covers the filter I should have bought in 2021. The loop closes itself.

The heat I cut, the filter I didn’t replace, the re-key I saved — those numbers are in my ledger. The asthma, the cracked heat exchanger, the TV that left with a stranger — those are in someone else’s. The math is clean. I have not asked the next question. You may.

Pearline renews in October. The $45 fee continues. The filter does not. Her son has another year on the nebulizer. Not the filter.

— Sterling A. Varice

Sterling A. Varice holds the Hayek-Friedman Chair and serves as Dean of Instruction at Warden University’s College of Business and Economics in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of three textbooks: Divine Mandates for Labor Utilization, Social Obligations for Profit Maximization, and Calibrated Deprivation: A Manager’s Guide to Employee Motivation.