Agreed. Whether there is rent control, the local authority should be obliged to offer to let houses at the controlled rent to people wanting them, building new houses if necessary.
I don't think there is any way to get a voting system to stop favoring people who vote in the current election over people who can't or don't, but the OP was talking about something different: local governments favoring a slight minority of voters (landlords, some of whom are nonresidents and can't vote at all) over the larger number of tennants. I say "slight minority" because quite a few "landlords" are not the Victorian aristocrats our cultural legacies from Marx's time make them out to be but rather individual people who saved up and now let one property.
We do want majority decision making, but Democracy, outside a theoretically extreme sense, is self-determination for all, not just the majority.
That's the reason for rule of law, human rights, and limited government - to protect those without power. The people with power always have had self-determination.
Totally agreed; nevertheless, any voting system capable of expressing the desires of voters should result in an outcome that better meets their desires than the desires of non-voters. If it didn’t, why would anyone vote?
Local governments are controlled by property owners. Rent control harms landlords but they are still property owners and the lack of competition makes selling apartments more lucrative.