It’s hard to blame a young New Yorker for feeling desperate. In June, the average one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan rented for $5,408 a month, and even a studio ran $4,014, according to a new analysis at American Thinker. Those numbers are enough to make anyone’s head spin—and, increasingly, enough to make young renters wonder whether socialism might offer a way out.
But writer Holly Jean Soto argues that the socialist prescription for housing is not just wrong-headed; it’s actively counterproductive. In a piece published Friday, Soto takes aim at the class-struggle framework that undergirds much of New York’s democratic socialist housing politics, arguing that treating landlords as the enemy and tenants as their victims ignores the fundamental problem: there simply aren’t enough apartments.
The frustration is legitimate. Housing is unaffordable, and young people are right to demand better. But the question isn’t whether landlords are exploiting tenants—it’s why so few apartments are being provided in the first place.
The Class-Struggle Blind Spot
Soto traces the socialist housing analysis back to Karl Marx, whose division of society into opposing economic classes has been adapted by New York’s democratic socialist movement into a simple narrative: the landlord profits, the tenant struggles, and therefore the landlord is the exploiter. Under that view, the fix is to take housing out of the hands of profit-driven owners and hand more control to tenants.
That framing, Soto contends, misses a crucial reality. Tenants and landlords are not opposing classes locked in a zero-sum battle. They are participants in the same housing market, and they depend on each other. Renters need people willing to build, maintain, and invest in housing; landlords need people willing to rent. When policy makes it harder or less profitable to provide housing, it’s tenants who ultimately pay the price—in the form of fewer available units, deteriorating buildings, and fiercer competition for what remains.
“The most important question isn’t which side is exploiting the other,” Soto writes. “It’s: Why aren’t enough apartments being provided for the people who need them?”
When Protecting Tenants Creates Scarcity
The socialist answer to high prices, Soto observes, tends to be price controls on the existing housing stock rather than efforts to increase supply. Rent freezes and tighter rent regulation may help current tenants in the short term, but they do nothing to create more housing—and can actually make it less attractive to provide it.
New York City is a case study in how well-intentioned tenant protections can backfire. In the middle of one of the worst housing shortages in the country, tens of thousands of rent-stabilized apartments are sitting off the market. Many need substantial renovations before they can be rented again. But the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act eliminated the old vacancy increase and severely restricted how owners can recover renovation costs through future rents.
For a landlord staring at tens of thousands of dollars in repairs, with only limited ability to recoup that investment, the rational choice can be to leave the unit empty. Kenny Burgos, CEO of the New York Apartment Association, estimates that 60,000 rent-stabilized apartments are currently vacant.
Even for apartments that are occupied, the economics are increasingly strained. The Rent Guidelines Board determines how much rent-stabilized rents can rise, and those increases have consistently lagged behind the actual cost of maintaining the buildings. Since 2019, operating expenses—property taxes, insurance, water, utilities, labor, and repairs—have climbed by roughly 40%, while rent revenue has risen only around 16%.
“In other words,” Soto notes, “the cost of providing the housing is rising far faster than landlords are allowed to raise the rent to cover it.” The affordability promise starts working against itself: controlling the existing supply doesn’t create more of it, and when controls make it harder to renovate vacant apartments, maintain aging buildings, or attract investment, New Yorkers are left fighting over an ever-shrinking pool of homes.
The Real Path to Affordability
Soto is careful to say that the answer isn’t protecting bad landlords. Fraud, unsafe conditions, and contract violations should be punished, she argues. But profit itself is not the enemy of affordable housing—it’s the incentive that drives people to build, renovate, and maintain places for people to live.
The solution, she writes, is more housing. That means getting vacant apartments back on the market, removing regulations that make renovation financially impossible, easing zoning and permitting barriers, and reducing the cost of construction. Most of all, it means creating enough supply that landlords have to compete for tenants—instead of tenants competing against each other for whatever apartments are left.
“That’s the part socialism gets backwards,” Soto concludes. “You cannot make something abundant by making it harder to provide. And you cannot solve a shortage by controlling an already scarce supply.”
Young New Yorkers deserve affordable housing, she adds. But they won’t get there through policies that create even more scarcity.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/08/socialism-and-new-york-city-s-housing-crisis/