(FORTUNE Magazine) – A question suddenly leaped to mind the other day, along with a proposed answer, when we heard of New York State's latest proposals for rental housing in New York City. Question: In what sense does a landlord in the city ''own'' the apartment he is leasing? Certain familiar attributes of ownership are plainly nonoperative in the Big Apple. Ever since 1943, when the wartime emergency was proclaimed, landlords have not been free to decide what rents to charge, or free to evict tenants, or free to tear down the building and put up something better. Their tenants, meanwhile, have been gaining a broad range of property rights, including a right to pass apartments on to relatives. In recent months, Mario and his men have been tightening the screws on the landlords. Just before the election, Cuomo finally took a stand against ''vacancy decontrol'' -- an arrangement under which some regulated apartments might finally fall into the free market when the renter leaves -- and also denied the allegation that his director of housing was a secret fan of vac.-dec. ''We're with the tenants,'' the governor's chief of staff told the press. The latest state study confirms this unsurprising alignment. Mario's director of housing now proposes to make evictions even tougher. He also wants rent-stabilized tenants to get permanent leases. In fact, he wants the regulatory setup declared permanent, so that he does not have to periodically ask the legislature to confirm ''the facts of a housing emergency.'' Proposed answer to the question above: Landlords own their property in somewhat the same sense in which Soviet workers own their factories.