This is a post that was in draft form since March, 2015....   here it is unchanged from that draft...
I'm sorting out thoughts on building matters.  Some apartments become stagnant because they have the best residential insulation New York City can provide, a rent stabilized lease.  It was the result of an emergency housing crisis in the 1920s.  (?)   It is a law applied and protected with a fervor bordering on the religious.  As with all affirmative actions, its forced effort also achieves opposite results.

Summary:   I'm protected.  I'm lucky.  It's a great deal.  I can't move!  Everything must stay as it is. I'm trapped.

Me, I'm ready to keep everything exactly as it is.  I am not one for change.  Everything is fine. It really is, but change is also good and fun and filled with hidden opportunity.

Anyway, I finally threw out the old couch and bought a new one.  Next thing I knew there was a bedbug outbreak in the building.  It's still a second hand alarm because, maybe tomorrow I will but, up to now, in all my ridiculous life I have never seen more than a picture of a bedbug.  

Do cockroaches really eat them?  We got rid of all the cockroaches... Did we need them?  We exterminated an entire civilization, it having no small degree of intelligence and sensitivity.

Should we get diatumacious earth?  Peppermint Oil?  Let's hand our problem over to The Professionals.

Anyway, landlords at least outwardly don't like maintaining rent stabilization.  I think there are tax breaks that go with compliance, but on a more specific level, there are ways to escape the law requiring the issuance of a rent stabilized lease, Coop conversion!   

Ultimately the landlord is delegating building management to the tenants, kind of like delegating prison management responsibility to the prisoners (asylum management to the inmates).  

However, because each kernel of earth ownership is a government protected monopoly that has somehow become the basis for all western civilization... you can not lose by buying in.