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by konceptz 2778 days ago
The way you worded this implies that it helps a very small number compared to how much housing it takes away. Isn’t it the same number?
2 comments

Where there is rent control, there is less incentive to build housing, therefore fewer houses.
nah man, this argument gets torn apart because "rent control doesn't apply to new developments so it's neutral on new development"

What it does is it takes rental units off the market because being faced with the maintenance risk of 5 or 20 year or however long the tenant stays fixed income vs. convert it to owner-occupied housing and take a large payout now, landlords often choose to ellis up the place.

And if they don't remove rental stock, then they're incentivized to provide shittier service -- delay repairs, delay upkeep, ignore tenant requests -- to encourage the rent-controlled tenant to move elsewhere so they can reset their price.

>this argument gets torn apart because "rent control doesn't apply to new developments so it's neutral on new development"

Most implementations of rent control make it difficult to redevelop those properties into higher density housing. After all, if you could remove people from those units to redevelop, rent control wouldn't be worth much. This reduces total housing available which drives up prices elsewhere. Rent control is always a massive wealth transfer to a couple of winners from a massive number of losers.

That depends almost entirely on what kind of rent control gets implemented.

If you only ever rent control 100 units, then yeah, it should only affect the owners of those units. You might have some other problems with it, it incentivizes slumlording, but it shouldn't be a systematic disincentive to build housing.

But that also only helps 100 people. If you expand rent control onto more existing properties or mandate that new units be built under rent control (or even just have credible candidates talking about doing that), it's a disincentive to anyone looking at offering rental properties - especially cheap rental properties, which are much more likely to become a net loss as prices rise.