By Al Barbarino
Amid a perpetual rent stabilization debate, one of New York’s leading housing experts is warning that the city’s highly contentious laws are unconstitutional.
Sherwin Belkin, a Manhattan lawyer who represents some of the city’s top landlords, blasted a legal brief that the city issued this week calling the legislation a “legitimate exercise of government police power.”
Instead, Belkin says, the rent laws that were introduced during the Second World War to address a housing emergency may just violate owners’ Fifth Amendment rights.
The verbal volley comes following an appeals courts ruling …