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Comment by jlhawn | Hacker News Reader

St. Paul's rent control does go pretty far. Personally, I think it's a mistake to have it apply to new construction. If you remember California Prop 21 from 2020, even that would have only allowed rent control on buildings which are at least 15 years old.

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I see almost all of our housing problems as direct descendants of the original sin of making it too hard to build and use structures. Any form of rent control is another form of NIMBYism, just this time with a progressive coat of paint.

This article has a bunch of cringeworthy prose, but has some worthwhile graphs of data showing that price-fixing isn't the answer:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-02/berlin...

See also numerous Planet Money stories about rent control:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/03/05/700432258/the-...

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/31/1077086398/is-it-time-to-cont...

https://www.npr.org/2019/03/29/707908952/the-evidence-agains...

Note that even very-progressive Jerusalem Demsas was once against rent control and has only switched sides as a palliative measure because fixing the root cause of the problem is proving too difficult.

Freakonomics also did a show on the topic:

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-rent-control-doesnt-wor...

In many California cities at least, you can connect all of the rent control measures in the late '70s to significant downzonings which occurred in the previous decade or so. I wonder if it could also be be considered a factor which contributed to the passage of proposition 13 in 1978.

https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/programs/housing/housing-supply/z...

edit: So I actually consider rent control to be a result of low housing production rather than the other way around. Associate Professor Shane Phillips from the Lewis Center (linked above) also considers rent control to be a very reasonable policy as long as there's plenty of realistic zoned capacity for more housing. Everyone is always arguing that if we build more then that would keep rents from rising so why not have rent control anyway then?

I don't follow. If you don't have a problem (in this case expensive housing) why would you need to do something about that problem (in this case rent control)? It's extra complexity serving no purpose. And that will inevitably come with enforcement issues, disputes, lawsuits, etc.

But yes, I think you're right that rent control is typically a political result of insufficient housing production. But it's a bad policy. Price fixing is never the answer to a supply problem, even if it's a popular one.

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