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In the past I've been very much against rent control, believing it to be a band-aid on structural problems that helps communities avoid fixing the real problems. I still believe that to be mostly the case, but I think a) tough luck, communities have housing problems that rarely have easy fixes, and rent control can help, and b) rent control, if implemented in a certain way, is probably something that is generally good. By "certain way", I mean removing the problem you state: all units in a city should be subject to rent control. In addition, rent increase caps should be indexed with wage growth, or some sort of wage growth + CPI blend that ensures housing costs don't rise faster than wages, but that landlords can still remain financially solvent as their own costs go up. And finally, tenants moving out and new tenants moving in shouldn't be a trigger for a landlord to "reset" the rent to "market" rate. Change those things, and I think rent control will work much better. And I think it will also serve as downward pressure on purchase prices, because prospective landlords won't want to buy rental properties if their rental income can't cover a high monthly mortgage payment. It might push down on non-rental property prices too, since if they get too high, people will prefer to rent instead of buy. Of course, all of this needs to be accompanied by building new housing all the time. Affordable rental pricing is great, but it still sucks if you end up unable to rent something because you're competing with 100 other people for 1 unit. Supply must rise in response to demand, and that alone will serve as a powerful check on rent and purchase prices. (Then again, arguably in an place where supply and demand are in equilibrium, you don't need rent control in the first place!) I'm not an economist or housing expert, so I know this won't fix everything, and there are probably problems with my (overly simple) proposal above. But I agree that the current implementation of rent control in many places (in the US, at least) offers pretty bad trade offs. |