[stymaar]

The point of the comment you're responding to is that shortage of affordable housing is ubiquitous, and you can't blame rent control on that in most places (which don't have rent control in the first place).

I don't think rent control is the most efficient solution to the problem, but believing it's a greater problem than the status quo is delusional. The status quo suck, and it mostly sucks because over the past 30 years housing policies in the West have been driven by the belief that markets dynamics are a good way to manage housing.

[WalterBright]

Nobody has ever found a better way to manage housing than the free market.

In the past 30 years, the government has never been more involved in zoning and regulation of housing.

[stymaar]

> Nobody has ever found a better way to manage housing than the free market.

That's just a religious belief of yours. And it's especially off the mark on the “free” part: you can't have a free market for housing, ever, because barriers to entry are always going to be high (and sometimes impossibly high for geometric reasons; there's just so much coastline for instance), and housing is very much not a commodity.

On the flip side, mixed systems in places in most of Europe for several decades after WWII and they were immensely successful. Housing was way more affordable and available back then despite fast growing population and rapidly evolving housing standards that forced owners to constantly invest in their properties to upgrade them.