Rent control

Rent control is the older of New York's regulation regimes, covering a shrinking population of long-tenured tenancies in older buildings — units continuously occupied by the same tenant or qualifying successors since before the modern regime's cutoffs. Its mechanics differ from stabilization's: maximum-rent machinery rather than guideline increases, with its own succession and decontrol rules.

For records purposes, controlled units are the rarer and less visible species — their numbers decline by attrition, and their presence in a building surfaces mainly through registration data and the building's age. Analytically they matter where they exist: deeply below-market rents with strong protections, priced into any building that carries them.