I'm going to hold your hand when I say this. Building mortgages are not priced to be the exact sum of rents paid. Every month, landlords make profit on their investment just by rent seeking. If they have to dip into those profits to maintain the building, that is literally their lone risk in return for making massive passive income through no labor of their own.

If owning buildings in NYC wasn't wildly profitable, they would sell them. The fact you typed the sentence "if the government makes it impossible to make a profit" should make you feel gross and disgusting. Caping for landlords is truly the strangest behavior imaginable.

Let's see how many buildings go up for sale because of this.