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Then again we have high rates of abandoned or unused housing as investment properties that sit idle even with uncapped markets… might as well cap the market if the effect is the same but people pay less rent

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If you look closer, it's still Supply & Demand ruling.

Housing is unused when the revenue from rents is less than the cost of taking care of the renter. Renting out a place can have high costs, like having a bad renter.

BTW, rentals can also remain unrented because if the landlord rents it at the current rental rate, rent control laws may force him to maintain that low rent for the long term.

Hence, it is less risky to just leave it vacant.

Rent control has all kinds of self-defeating consequences.

Or you just force people to rent out vacant flats. You have 60 days once a formal letter is received and you have to rent it to someone in that time, or you’ll be fined. That’s one way to force supply of a good that isn’t actually scarce but has artificial scarcity. Worked pretty well in some of the European metropolita and it works in New York now too. We have to stop treating housing like a simple commodity

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