It wasn’t an issue of high crime or far away places during COVID, it was that the people who would normally live in those apartments simply left NYC entirely. We saw the biggest rent collapses in affluent Manhattan and Brooklyn neighborhoods where a large % of people are not physically tied to the city. Remote work and lockdowns made it easy for them to run off to the Hamptons, Hudson Valley, Miami, and elsewhere (which is part of why people are fighting return to office so aggressively). So landlords had to drop rents to attract the greatly reduced pool of potential tenants.

There are plenty of examples in other parts of the US where liberal housing supply policies have helped limit the rise of home prices - this is the Texas approach in a nutshell. We’ve only been able to see the impact of a demand shock in NYC because city housing policy has prevented dramatic supply expansion for decades. But, both lead to the same place. We want so many apartments available that landlords have to earn their tenants, instead of having a waiting list a mile long. As a side effect, increasing the housing supply might also break the broker system, which would be great for renters.