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Comment by jeffbax | Hacker News Reader

Rent control being bad for the housing market is one of the few generally agreed upon conclusions across the political spectrum of economists

https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html

> Economists are virtually unanimous in concluding that rent controls are destructive. In a 1990 poll of 464 economists published in the May 1992 issue of the American Economic Review, 93 percent of U.S. respondents agreed, either completely or with provisos, that “a ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available.”

Your gut instinct, like most on this issue, is incorrect. When removing rent control, it is going to take time for things to finally settle to the real prices as well as actual development to get started, but its certainly good for the long run to do away with it.

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The reason this subject is tough is because quantity and quality do not necessarily lead to affordability for the same population as rent control. Laissez Faire economics always works for the faceless theoretical self interested actor but how are rising prices and new builds going to help to someone from being priced out? It can't. If it did, the control would be benign anyway.

> quantity and quality do not necessarily lead to affordability for the same population as re t control.

Rent control is not need-based. People across the wealth spectrum enjoy the personal benefits of rent control (in SF there is no shortage of housholds bringing home several hundred thousand dollars a year who pay way below market rents on their rent-controlled apartments).

The problem with getting rid of it is that the benefits of more housing supply relative to demand would probably take decades to come to fruition. But the pain of suddenly losing rent control (for the percentage of people who actually do need it) is felt immediately. Who cares if your city will have lots of cheap housing in a decade if you can't pay rent next month?

This is all conjecture from your gut. We are watching what rent control does to a city like SF in real time -- it is a disaster. The only way out of it is to ramp up supply. To whatever degree Tokyo has priced anyone out, it is significantly less than the likes of most US cities because it does not purposefully retard investment with zoning and rent control.

"People across the wealth spectrum" do NOT enjoy rent control. It gets gamed and abused. The bulk of SF is rent controlled, resulting in more and more people cramming into places that don't get maintained and they're not able to move out of when situations like their job changes. This is a disaster, nobody can move to be closer to work. Only a tiny amount of market rate housing is available for new residents which is disproportionately high because the rest of the market is severely under-priced.

You will never stop everyone from getting priced out. That is just the nature of things, but you can save a lot more people that pain than we do now due to foolish policies like rent control and awful zoning.

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