Nora is a unit in the sixth-floor corridor of a building I own. The door closer costs $14.60. I declined it this month. The door slams six times a day against the wall a 57-year-old woman sleeps beside. God bless the cheerful giver.
Your key has turned at the same address. Your cheap rents my building. Daniel Flynn wrote this week in National Review that Mayor Mamdani’s rent freeze won’t work. He is right. It won’t work because the shortage the freeze creates is one I’ve been manufacturing on purpose for 30 years. He was too polite to tell you who manufactures the shortage. I will.
Let me put the numbers where you can see them. I own a walk-up on West 116th. The rent roll calls Dolores — 71 years old, in 4-B — $1,127 a month. The rent roll calls the unit next door, empty since March, $4,495 a month. The boiler the 2 units share is a 1947 Weinheimer. The annual tune-up my property manager wrote into the service contract costs $4,400. I’ve skipped it 6 years running. The repair that would restore her heat is $8,200. I’ve declined it for six winters.
$8,200 is a coupon. It doesn’t register against the differential. $4,495 minus $1,127 is $3,368 a month. Over 12 months, $40,416. Over the 30-year hold my REIT underwriter modeled when I bought the building, $1,212,480 per unit, discounted. Multiply by 47 units in the walk-up. You are counting the way I count now. The radiator can stay cold.
I am not the man who can’t afford to fix the boiler. I am the man who can’t afford to keep Dolores warm. The warmth costs $8,200. The cold costs me nothing I haven’t already saved.
Kareem works the boiler in both my buildings on 113th and 116th — 19 years. His instructions when the heat cuts out in 4-B are written by my property manager and signed by me: do not repair. Document. Forward the work order to my accountant. Kareem repairs anyway, sometimes, with $40 of his own materials, because he can’t stand what Dolores says on the answering machine. He costs me $58,000 a year plus a basement unit that listed for $3,200 a month in 2014. I haven’t raised Kareem’s compensation in 9 years. The $3,200 is mine the day he leaves. Same law. Different body. Watch how little changes.
The ceiling has done me a courtesy. When the price is held down and the rooms become scarce, the room does not become merciful. It becomes mine to allocate. A new unit would create alternatives. Alternatives would make Dolores less grateful for the radiator and me less important to the city. I have welcomed the shortage in the practical manner of a man who welcomes a moat. The capital review at Nora’s building denied the $38,400 elevator contract last quarter. Her share of the saving is $457.14 a year. That is the amount I keep from Nora’s knees. The door closer, the elevator, the boiler — each the cheapest skipped repair out of a stack of skipped repairs. The skipped repair is not an oversight. It is the line item.
Nora is not a tragedy. Tragedy suggests an event. She is a procedure. Each month, I renew the lease, defer the repair, and collect the gratitude that scarcity manufactures. The door closer remains in the capital plan. The capital plan remains under review.
A shortage does not merely raise the price of what exists. It raises the value of permission. The person who controls the scarce door controls the applicant, the lease, the repair, the transfer, and the silence. The law announces protection. I receive discretion. The visible face is Dolores in a cold apartment and Nora climbing six flights with a grocery bag cutting into her fingers. The other face is my quarterly, where the elevator is a negative number and her evening is not a category.
I am not new. I am the oldest arrangement in this city, wearing this decade’s vocabulary. The landlord who keeps the heat off so the rent roll can live is the same man who kept the whip on so the cotton could live. The arrangement predates Mr. Mamdani. The arrangement predates Mr. Friedman. The arrangement will outlast the freeze because the freeze was never the point. I have solved the theological difficulty: I serve mammon directly and ask the tenant to call the arrangement stability.
The Lord did not abolish mastery. He regulated it.
“Servants, be subject to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the harsh.” — 1 Peter 2:18
The Bible regulates what it does not abolish. I haven’t abolished the rent. I have declined to repair the radiator. The arrangement holds.
Her knees locked on the seventh-floor landing last Tuesday. I replaced the elevator contract with a notice.
Dolores will not leave. I’ve offered $22,000 to vacate, paid in two installments, contingent on a waiver of her right to return. She’s refused twice. The waiver is in a manila folder on my desk. The radiator is the next document in the folder. The folder has been thick since 2019. I’ll add to it. The differential doesn’t require her to leave this month. The differential requires only that I haven’t yet paid $8,200.
Dolores turned 71 in October. The repair is $8,200. The winter is long.
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.