[hank777]

I disagree. He bases his argument on the idea that rent control causes high rents as demonstrated in places like NY. This is patently false in my opinion, but my opinion is not what counts. The reason I say it is unsubstantiated and therefore insane, is that he provided no argument for the idea that there is a causation between high rents and rent control. The author falls into the all too common trap of mapping a correlation to a causation. That may be a good strategy to throw red meat to right wingers, but it is not a well constructed argument.

[tptacek]

Are we talking about the same article? In the one I remember, he backed his argument up with a survey of deviation from median rent in markets with and without rent control.

[timr]

Yes, he observed a correlation. In this case, there's a very reasonable argument to be made against a causal relationship: cheap cities don't institute rent control.

[tptacek]

While I disagree with the article, that argument is probably easy to respond to; there are relatively expensive cities that don't have rent control, and his measurements are deviation from median, not just the median rent itself.

[timr]

Neither of those is an effective counter-argument:

1) The existence of expensive cities without rent control doesn't tell us anything about the effect of rent control on rent (cities can be expensive for lots of reasons unrelated to rent control), unless you do a study comparing roughly equivalent expensive cities, some with rent control, and some without. The author didn't do that -- he compared cities with rent control, to cities without, and found that cities with rent control are more expensive. This was bad experimental design.

2) His measurements found that the distributions around the median were different for expensive cities vs. inexpensive ones. But it doesn't really matter that he was comparing the shapes of the distributions, and not their medians, because one can reasonably expect that expensive cities will have a larger contingent of really expensive homes than inexpensive cities, even without the effect of rent control. For that matter, rent control might be the only thing giving the expensive cities a stock of inexpensive housing at all!

Again, for a proper experiment, the author needed to compare equivalently priced cities, varying only the factor of rent control. He didn't do that.