Confusion over what government does

So, what’s wrong with this thinking?  First, from the NYTimes:

The shrinking supply of these apartments, highlighted by researchers at New York University, illustrates not only the increasing strain that housing costs have had on this city of renters, but also the limits of the mayor’s success in providing the city’s poor with reasonable places to live. While the mayor’s plan has put thousands of low-income families in new or rehabilitated buildings and helped stabilize neighborhoods, it has been nearly drowned out by the twin waves of gentrification and rent deregulation.

Then, from FDL, in reference to the above:

Mayors like Bloomberg are trying to keep up, but this is clearly a bigger problem than classic development planning schemes can solve.

Deregulation is government policy.  Therefore one of the two main factors driving poor folks out of New York is fully something that could be reversed by government any time they want to.

People get awfully confused about what government does and doesn’t do, and there’s little that’s more classic development planning than rent control.  Rent control existed exactly to make sure that poorer people weren’t driven out of neighborhoods.  Removing it has had exactly the effect anyone should have expected.