Apartment dwellers upset this week at the prospect of an increase in their stabilized rents would do well to remember the real culprit: It’s not the city’s rent guidelines board, which performs an unenviable task, but the system of rent control and stabilization itself. An ostensibly temporary measure — like the income and sales tax increases proposed by the Legislature and the mayor — instituted during World War II, rent control plagues the city’s housing market. If New York were simply to do away with the system, some rents might go up in the short term. Mainly that would mean those of the rich in Manhattan. But the housing market would grow far more hospitable overall.

SUNY’s provosts, Peter Salins, an expert on housing policy, argues that the main impediment to new housing construction in the city — construction that would ultimately give renters some breathing room — is the fact that so many renters are locked into rent-controlled apartments that they are loathe to give up. “Almost all the new housing development is for people that trade up or trade laterally…If the majority of the market is locked in place, they won’t be in the market,” Mr. Salins told the Sun recently. With a paucity of units being built or vacated, New York’s housing squeeze grows ever tighter.

The cliched defense of this status quo is that rent control, as Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver put it recently, is “keeping the middle class in the city.” Actually, it’s keep ing the lucky rich on the Upper West Side. It turns out that virtually all of the benefits of rent control accrue to residents of Manhattan, whereas residents of the outer boroughs would hardly see a jump in rent if the controls were eliminated, according to a recent study by MIT housing economist Henry Pollakowski. Regulated renters in the Bronx would see a difference of only $58 a month; at Brooklyn, that number is $5; at Queens and Staten Island there is effectively no benefit to keeping rent control. Yet on the Upper East and Upper West Sides, the differential is on the order of $400. All New York taxpayers are burdened with the $40 million bill to administer this system.

Faced with the evidence on rent control, it would be extraordinarily cynical for the governor to renew it on June 15, when the previous six-year extension expires. In the past, rent control has been used as a bargaining chip in negotiations of other matters. If come June the Legislature has rammed through its tax-and-spend budget, it seems there might be little left for which the governor would care to bargain. As its no secret that he has his eye on the national stage, Mr. Pataki might want to make headlines as the governor who ended Soviet-style regulation in the Big Apple. Furthermore, as Mr. Salins told the Sun, ending rent control would “dramatically” increase the state’s property tax take, because property values would increase. This could pave the way for future reductions in the income and sales taxes, at both the state and city levels. It’s relief our beleaguered renters could use.