The article I chose to focus this response on was “Rent Stabilization in New York City” from the Furman Center for Real Estate & Urban Policy”. Reading through this, I felt as though the secret purpose of this brief article was to substantiate every claim Proffesor Botein has made in class regarding rent stabilization and control.  After all, what is a claim without evidence to back it up, and this article delivers in an abundance of figures and percentages. As a lover of numerical data, I spent the bulk of my time with this article scanning though the tables of 2011 population level data for NYC. Right off the bat, I had no clue that rent stabilized housing made up such a tremendous portion of the for rent housing in the city. The fact that over a million apartments, or 47% of the rentable units in the city have the prices they may be rented for regulated is mind blowing, but the following fact that only 8% of these units are made so voluntarily by their owners begs the following questions. (1) Why are so few owner participants in the program willing to voluntarily subject to rent stabilization? (2) How is the city government capable of controlling the rate rents charged by the owners of private property, and how can they enforce this on such a large scale?

Point 1 is addressed in the article, as participants are granted tax benefits, but what are these and why would they encourage such a low percentage of participants in the program? This leads to the most likely to point 2 being that adequate benefits are provided to these owners to justify their compliance. I would however still like a better understanding  of what causes compliance with this program, and what could be done to encourage more owners to consent to voluntary rent stabilization.