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In my day, the word "pink" was slang for "somewhat communist." It meant someone who had communist leanings but who wasn't a full on Soviet.
So a board unlikely to be sympathetic to arguments of the form "$LANDLORD1 and $POTENTIAL-TENANT2 are richer than $CURRENT-TENANT3, therefore $LANDLORD1's desire for a fancy car to compensate for his anatomical shortcomings and $POTENTIAL-TENANT2's desire to move into the district that two decades ago he treated as more dangerous than Fallujah are more important than $CURRENT-TENANT3's desire to stay in the home where she has lived through the entire Elizabethan era while still being able to afford to taste something other than shame."
Agreed. A more interesting question is whether that board would be sympathetic to the landlord's argument where (1) the current tenant has been retired for many years; his children have moved out; and not only does he have a lot more space than he needs, he has a location which is much nearer to the financial district than he needs; (2) the potential tenant could make much better use of the apartment since he has a wife, small children, and a job nearby; and (3) the landlord is a real estate investment trust with many investors who are themselves retirees who are struggling to make ends meet.
That being said, I think your hypothetical exposes a basic question of economics: Should scarce and valuable resources be distributed (1) based on a committee's opinion about who is most deserving; or (2) based on peoples' willingness to pay some private owner for those resources. I think it's fair to identify the first approach with Communism and the second approach with Capitalism.
You can certainly argue things both ways (and it doesn't have to be all one or the other) but my observations of history strongly suggest to me that option (1) tends to be counterproductive -- to put it politely.
I think it's also worth keeping in mind that other than the landlord, the first potential tenant, and the second potential tenant, there is another party to your hypothetical: Another potential landlord. Because as a society we want and need capital to be invested in building new housing stock. If the rent control mechanism sides too strongly with incumbent tenants, it will chase away investors and ultimately harm the class of people which the system is, in theory, trying to help.
One last point:
This is a big part of my issue with Communism or Marxism or whatever you want to call it. In practice it is typically infused with a kind of mean-spiritedness to the point where it can be seen as a kind of hate ideology. If the goal is to punish and humiliate rich people, well, even if a case could can be made for Communism in the abstract, it's probably not worth pursuing.
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A board that treats competence and contributing to society in ways that people actually desire enough to pay for, pale skin, and indeed the ability to spell your own name as being spiritual defects and anatomical defects per your charming descriptor, decided that being able to use the fruits of your labour to improve your life and to make a new prosperous district mattered far less than the right to contribute nothing while defecting on your debts and shoving the costs onto other people.
Isn't bulverism fun?
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