Rent Control Used to Work – During Wartime

[Housingprovider]

Rent Control Used to Work – During Wartime

It isn’t designed to redress today’s shortage of affordable housing.

Excellent research from Bloomberg!

It’s hard to believe, but rent control is back in vogue. Two states facing shortages of affordable housing, Oregon and New York, have already passed laws that aim to restrain residential rents; other states and cities aren’t far behind. As always, when governments resort to rent control, not everyone thinks it’s such a great idea.

Over time, rent control lost its connection with war, becoming instead a sacred cow for left-leaning politicians, who have viewed it as a symbol of the righteous power of regulation to redress inequality. For those on the right, rent control is a poster child for demonstrating how government can distort the play of the free market.

It’s fine to have that debate. But a good first step would be to recognize that this policy was born of bloodshed and crisis, not contemporary housing woes. That a temporary wartime measure has now become a simplistic solution to the modern shortage of affordable housing in the U.S. — a problem that arises from zoning laws and tax subsidies, not wartime overcrowding — suggests that policymakers ought to try harder to come up with new, more effective strategies.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/artic ... ng-wartime

[Propertymanager]

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