[sampo]

Here is also Paul Krugman in The New York Times 19 years ago:

The analysis of rent control is among the best-understood issues in all of economics, and -- among economists, anyway -- one of the least controversial. In 1992 a poll of the American Economic Association found 93 percent of its members agreeing that ''a ceiling on rents reduces the quality and quantity of housing.'' Almost every freshman-level textbook contains a case study on rent control, using its known adverse side effects to illustrate the principles of supply and demand. Sky-high rents on uncontrolled apartments, because desperate renters have nowhere to go -- and the absence of new apartment construction, despite those high rents, because landlords fear that controls will be extended? Predictable.

...

None of this says that ending rent control is an easy decision. Still, surely it is worth knowing that the pathologies of San Francisco's housing market are right out of the textbook, that they are exactly what supply-and-demand analysis predicts.

But people literally don't want to know. A few months ago, when a San Francisco official proposed a study of the city's housing crisis, there was a firestorm of opposition from tenant-advocacy groups. They argued that even to study the situation was a step on the road to ending rent control -- and they may well have been right, because studying the issue might lead to a recognition of the obvious.

https://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a-rent...

[ebog]

It's interesting because the argument these NIMBYs use against studying rent control is the exact same as the one gun rights activists and the NRA used against allowing the CDC to study the effects of gun ownership rates.

These privileged "progressives" need to be put in their place politically.

[dredmorbius]

Sorry, could you clarify that?

[sampo]

Opposing a study of the city's housing crisis is a really shitty thing to do.

[jandrese]

This seems to assume that rent controls are the only thing preventing new home construction (because of the uncertainty of being able to sell units without being hit by rent control), but supply can be restricted in many ways. The most common of which is simply running out of room thanks to natural boundaries (rivers, oceans, lakes) and local policies against building high density housing.

So rent control tends to show up in areas where rents are growing significantly faster than inflation already, meaning the rent control is at best a band-aid over the existing problem. And then the problem gets worse and economists blame rent controls.