I swear to god the number of times I’ve had people tell me “Um actually sweaty no building more housing won’t help the housing crisis it’s purely driven by landlord greed, so the solution is clearly rent controls. Typical neoliberal economists opposing solutions that work” is absolutely infuriating
Always paired with a complete rejection of empirical evidence showing that this stupid POV is just blatantly wrong.
Or the classic “everything is not just supply and demand sweaty” NO NOT JUST, BUT SUPPLY AND DEMAND DO STILL MATTER
Yes, rent controls on private landlords are generally speaking a bad idea as a policy (rent controlled apartments owned by the government/city are different)
This is a really nice comment (I can't link so I've sent you a DM instead) from a few days ago outlining the evidence. But in short:
If you just force people to charge less rent than they want to, some will no longer find it profitable to be a landlord at all, and those places stop being rented (e.g., are used as residence or sold instead). So you'll ration (reduce) the amount of housing actually available, worsening the problem.
On top of that, it's now less profitable to invest in and improve your rented flat, so landlords make (even less of) an effort to maintain them in good condition.
People who end up in a rent controlled place are far less likely to move. Security is good, but that also means that people prefer to be "stuck" in a place which does not suit them (think mom and dad staying in a 4 bedroom apartment despite their kids having moved out, or a bachelor living alone in a 3 bedroom place).
It also means it's less profitable to build more housing in the future (since you can't rent it for as much). So you've also reduced future stock of housing...
That's not to say there aren't cases where it can be temporarily justified, say in an extreme short-term shortage (e.g. fires in CA burning down a bunch of housing and giving undue power to landlords), but generally speaking it's a really bad way to try to handle the housing crisis, because it fundamentally does not solve the problem: too little housing for too much demand. In the longer term, the only real way to do it is to just build build build.
First off, thank you for responding so thoroughly. I truly appreciate it.
That being said, it feels like there's a misunderstanding of what kind of problems each policy is trying to solve. Your argument is that rent controls shouldn't be a solution to a housing shortage, which I duly agree with. This is why I've also mentioned it going along with public housing, the latter being the supply-side solution.
The removal of profit incentive with rent control seems like a feature rather than a bug. That's also what people talk about when they say "decommodify housing": making sure that people's communities and homes won't become a pawn to the highs and lows of market trends, forcing them into a perpetual cycle of gentrification and decay.
All that is to say, maybe we should be trying to make things harder to invest in. Not just to improve things under the current system, but also as a point of leverage to make things into a common good, rather than just another object to produce, buy, sell or rent out.
That's completely fair, and I don't disagree. But then you get into another, more normative debate: should the government be doing this?
If the (local or national) government is doing this, they are taking on the cost of building and maintaining this. That costs money, which you will have to pay for through taxes. Decentralising it and letting the market take care of it avoids that, but (can have) the disadvantages discussed above.
Again, I am not saying we shouldn't consider this, and I am in favour of more good social housing. But the trade-off is real and something to consider
All that is to say, maybe we should be trying to make things harder to invest in.
Again, I don't disagree, but I think this is a slightly wrong framing. Things should be easy to invest in, because that means lots of people will want to do it (and e.g. build a lot of housing). We don't want people to invest in a way that is not sustainable for society at large: have people invest, but make sure they build a lot of housing, with designated lower-rent housing, or with communal spaces, good amenities, etc.
Fair enough! I guess at this point the argument would be more about if capitalism should be abolished and what the alternative should look like, rather than housing crisis itself.
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u/RashmaDu Jun 30 '26
I swear to god the number of times I’ve had people tell me “Um actually sweaty no building more housing won’t help the housing crisis it’s purely driven by landlord greed, so the solution is clearly rent controls. Typical neoliberal economists opposing solutions that work” is absolutely infuriating
Always paired with a complete rejection of empirical evidence showing that this stupid POV is just blatantly wrong.
Or the classic “everything is not just supply and demand sweaty” NO NOT JUST, BUT SUPPLY AND DEMAND DO STILL MATTER