that supposedly this will free the market and rents will go down.

i wish that were true; but i am going to go with my instinct on this one. if we take stuyvesant-town as a sample of the rent-controlled market, then most people living in rent controlled apartments are city employees.

with nothing now to hold them to the city, two things can happen :

(1) people will leave

(2) landlords now have an excuse to evict rent-controlled dwellers with homes outside the city (MetLife has been doing that here and rather aggressively).

Either way, the vacant rent-controlled apartments will mean that buildings will go sooner rather than later into market rates (aka, they will be decontrolled completely).

As I told my friend, I usually don't write about these things but, privately, I've predicted every single NYC real estate trend for the last 15 years. I am still kicking myself for not putting my foot down and getting into the Harlem market when I told my husband to do it (about 10 years ago).

I am usually wrong on a lot of things. I thought Argentina was going to win the world cup, for example. I also thought Superman was going to suck.

When it comes to trickle-down economics, I am unfortunately right. My time-frame prediction may not hit the mark, but mark my words, the market is going to explode with this one --and screw people like you and me in the process.

Eric Adams will be pissed. He is all for cops and firefighters to live in the city because off-duty cops and firefighters are still, in many ways, benefitting the community.

The problem with this plan is that the City of New York needs to be keeping its money IN the city. If half the city's union employees move out to Long Island en masse, that is a lot of the city's money that is leaving the city and benefitting businesses and communities that are out of town.

I'd say that if such a plan as they are working on is approved, it needs to come with a provision that hiring and promoting will be strongly biased in favor of those who live in the city. That you can be a city employee and live on Long Island, but if you do, you must expect that if there are five people competing for a job or a contract, that the City will look first at the two people who are up for the job who live in the city, before even considering the two who live on Long Island and the one who lives in Westchester. The City government has every reason to what to encourage people who make their money off the government, off of the city's taxpayers, to spend that money in support of the city's businesses and communities.