A Disturbing Insider's Look At New York City's 'Rentocrats'

Nora Ephron became the "crème de la crème of the city's rent-regulated tenants by bribing her way into an eight-room apartment for $1,500 a month at the Apthorp, the palatial building at Broadway and West 79th Street.

...Ephron is a smart, funny writer who now acknowledges the injustice of the system. But during her days in the Apthorp she was indignant when a new law stripped away her rent protection because her household income was more than $250,000 per year. She couldn't imagine anyone would dare charge her what the apartment became worth: $10,000 per month.

...Her expulsion from rent-control paradise, told in the current New Yorker, isn't exactly a heartbreaking story. But it gives a rare inside look at the rentocracy, the system allowing affluent New Yorkers to pay below-market rents and pass along the apartments to their children.

"I spent long dinners hearing rentocrats earnestly explain that while the free market may work for the rest of apartments in America, rents must be regulated in Manhattan because it is an island with a limited supply of housing. (If an out-of-towner suggested to these Manhattan theorists that the rent they charged for their vacation homes in Nantucket should also be regulated, they would explain that Nantucket is a different kind of island.)"

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