Some New Yorkers are responding to a threatened 3% increase in rents on one-year leases in rent-regulated apartments by stepping up their efforts to lobby the Rent Guidelines Board. What an anachronism. As it stands, the only thing New Yorkers get in exchange for outdated laws that serve as an effective subsidy on wealthy Manhattan renters is a system of unpredictable and politicized lease terms, mediocre midmarket housing stock, and a surfeit of luxury housing. Whatever the benefits of rent regulation were supposed to be, that doesn’t seem to be it.

The raucous meeting of the board earlier this week, which had to be suspended for 15 minutes at one point to allow tempers to cool, is best seen as a symptom of a deeper malady, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute, Nicole Gelinas, told us yesterday. Frustration constantly simmers throughout New York’s rental market and these annual meetings are the only chance for that pressure to vent. The real problem is that the market is ossified, “frozen in time,” as Ms. Gelinas puts it.

Rent regulation locks the city into the past. It keeps retired couples living in three-bedroom apartments because their controlled or stabilized units are cheaper than an unregulated one-bedroom. As a result, other people stay trapped in one-bedroom units since there aren’t any available three-bedroom apartments. The new one-bedroom into which that retired couple can’t afford to move is so expensive because rent laws, or even the mere threat of them based on the government’s history of meddling, channel most of the residential development money in the city into luxury units that are exempt from regulation.

The city’s housing construction market is booming right now, but rent regulation, in its effort to preserve the affordable rents of the past, thwarts any market effort to construct the affordable housing of the future. Then, in order to supply more affordable units, the government has to offer subsidies to developers, subsidies that help drive up taxes, placing further strain on the budgets of ordinary New Yorkers. Once New Yorkers manage to find apartments in this sclerotic market, there’s no guarantee the units will be well maintained. Because regulated rents almost never keep pace with the costs of running a building well, upkeep suffers.

This is especially likely to happen in smaller buildings, since small landlords feel the pinch most acutely. Rent regulation doesn’t just protect the rents of the past – it preserves the plumbing and heating of the past, too. Nor, as the latest episode suggests, is this system even really beneficial for all the rent-regulated tenants. Each year they face unpredictable rent increases based on whether they or their landlords are more successful in swaying the Rent Guidelines Board, instead of on any economic rationale. People can steel themselves for slow, steady inflation, but a politicized board-determined rent increase is another matter.

Once you take all of these factors into account, the tenants’ complaints at this week’s meeting start to make a lot of sense. One Brooklyn resident quoted by the New York Post bemoaned not just the rent increase but the lack of hot water in her building. Another complained that the rent increases must come out of her pension, Social Security, and retirement account, all of which, she took pains to note, are taxed. Meantime, as the Sun reported, others expressed concern that gentrification – meaning, in part, an increase in upper-market housing stock – is cutting into the stock of affordable housing.

If a rent increase of between 3% and 6.5% in a year seems a bit high, consider that it’s 3% of a rent that is already artificially low. The percentage tracks roughly with inflation, meaning that the luckier landlords will have a shot at covering their increased costs for items like heating oil. Many city residents don’t experience significant benefits from rent regulation anyway. By one count, the average savings in the Bronx is $58 a month, and it’s only $5 a month in Brooklyn. The benefits, such as they are for some, are almost exclusively confined to Manhattan, where the rent cut as a result of regulation is closer to $400 a month for units in tony neighborhoods.

New York’s real estate market has never had a chance to prove that it can supply affordable housing without rent regulation because for the past 60 years the government hasn’t been able to keep from meddling.The latest brouhaha suggests, yet again, that it’s time to consign rent regulation to the ash heap of New York history and clear the way for the housing market of tomorrow.