Problems of Rent Control

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Rent control is raised as an issue in city after city either because the city does not have rent control and some tenants' and liberal groups believe it should be instituted, or because the city does have rent control and critics want it abolished because of the damage they see it has done to housing, repair and construction, and even social relationships. Rent control is an idea with great appeal for the beleaguered tenant who feels that rents are too high and that there has been no government effort to correct the problem. Advocates see it as a way of imposing fairness, but in truth it imposes unfairness and disparity between people who have rented for a long time and new renters. It reduces the incentives landlords have to repair their buildings and to make improvements. It takes the profit out of being a landlord, and it effectively eliminates competition in housing in urban regions. In many cases, it has also created a black market in sublets, with those paying little for rent because they have rent-controlled apartments and renting them for higher prices to others illegally. An examination of the issue as it has developed over the past several decades will show why rent control is a bad idea and why it has not even accomplished its stated goals, let alone avoided creating new problems.

Tucker (1988) states the issue clearly with reference to New York City when he writes:

New York's legendary "housing shortage" began the day in 1947 when the huge tenant majority c

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instead of some other type of construction. The justification for rent control is offered by Lett (1976). She notes first that rent control is instituted because of the existence of a housing emergency for which this measure is a temporary stopgap measure: As long as the assumption of an emergency is paramount, rent control legislation will be an ad hoc approach unrelated to other housing policies and programs; it will not evolve into a comprehensive program focusing on the essence of the rent control dilemma--the widening gap between tenants' ability to pay and the increased rentals required to operate and maintain housing. (p. 197) Of course, this is precisely the problem as rent control has tended to become permanent rather than temporary, a measure that politicians fear attacking because of its popularity with tenants. Lett sees rent control as a clearly constitutional means of effecting changes in housing. She notes that the initial application of rent controls was brought about by wartime emergency housing shortages engendered in turn by decreases in housing construction because resources (materials and labor) were shifted to defense production. The problems were increased by large and rapid shifts of population to ar
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Approximate Word count = 2871
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

Problems of Rent Control

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