I used to live in NYC. Your thought is that elimination of rent control would mainly impact working-class families. Mine is that it would mainly impact welfare-class housing. Lack of rent control would create an incentive for landlords to upgrade housing that is currently slum-quality to working-class/middle-class standards.
That is the story, or one of them. But most poor people are in public housing or Section 8. There’s a huge Tier 2 “homeless shelter,” really an apartment building, in my neighborhood where people stay forever, refusing apartments because they like my neighborhood and don’t want to get sent to an outer borough.
Rent-regulated apartments are mostly held by working people who have had the apartments for years and have not managed to get on the income elevator so could not afford anything else. It is a middle-class or even lower-middle-class group and the apartments are not in slums. There are many artists, musicians, and actors who have not made the Big Time.
Don’t believe all the myths on this subject. They are mostly generated by envy, except that the people spreading the myths would not trade their high income for a low-rent apartment, so they are just blowing smoke and being good little conservatives.