I think his point is to essentially "break" the big landlords that own dozens if not hundreds of properties and play games like leaving half of them empty to artificially inflate rents. Capitalism is awesome ONLY when it leads to aggressive competition. I really wish this country understood decades ago that capitalism was only so amazing because it led to competition. It's actually competition that leads to amazing outcomes, capitalism is just a mechanism to get there.

If all the apartment unit owners owned at most 2-3 units there would be insane competition and none of those owners would ever want to leave a unit vacant. The competition with thousands of other owners would lead a race to the bottom for rent prices (while easily still staying very profitable due to NYC demand) it would be a true buyer/seller equilibrium.

Right now you have a dozen big landlords conglomerates that lazily all move in the same direction and hardly compete at all with each other.

If you look at 60s rents in this city where the environment was infinitely closer to the ideal with almost all landlords being small owners with just a couple properties and then adjust for inflation........you can easily see that the rents for the city would be cut in half. All while landlords would still make a killing.

So yes, a huge part of the solution here would be to find a way to break up the current landlord situation.