A good faith critique of rent control

Disclaimer: I am neither involved in politics, construction or have any stake at all in the cost of rent in Providence (I am fortunate enough to own my own home). I simply want to share my POV on rent control and what I see as the trade offs it brings. In short, this post comes in peace :)

I'm not here to tell you it's evil or that landlords are secretly angels. It's a legitimate policy choice, and if you are one of the people in a rent-controlled apartment, then rent control is genuinely great for you. But like every policy, it creates winners and losers and it's worth being honest about who wins and who loses.

The winners: people who already hold a rent-controlled unit. The get real, dependable protection from rent hikes. This provides stability and is generally a great thing.

The losers: everyone else who wants to rent. When landlords face a capped price on what they can charge, they stop investing in the property, and - crucially - often convert rent-controlled units into condos, sell to owner-occupants or redevelop entirely just to get out from under the cap. That shrinks the pool of rental housing available to anyone who doesn't already have a unit.

You don't have to take my word for it.

Stanford economists tested this directly (if you're curious, search for 'Diamond, McQuade & Qian, American Economic Review, 2019').

In 1994, San Francisco expanded rent control to more buildings; similar buildings built just a few years later stayed exempt — a natural experiment (and similar to the approach David Morales is proposing BTW).

The Result: tenants in rent controlled units moved 20% less and saved real money.

The trade off: landlords in those buildings cut rental supply by 15%, which pushed citywide rents up about 5%.

The net net: the total dollar cost to renters citywide roughly matched the total dollar benefit to protected tenants. So overall, rents didn't come down, they just came down for one group of people and that was offset by rents going up for another group of people.

AFAIK the Morales proposal for rent control is to limit rent increases in rent controlled units to 4%/year, excluding new units for the first 10 years after construction.

Folks, it is not difficult to predict what will happen if Morales wins this primary/election: every single landlord will jack up the price of rent immediately afterwards in order to get a more than 4% increase on the books now. And any new unit that comes on the market will have a higher rent than it otherwise would have so the developer is certain they will turn a profit before the 10 year clock runs out and that unit is capped at 4% / year.

I understand and share people's frustration with the high cost of housing/rent - we all want the same thing here: cheaper rent. And I get why rent control feels like an obvious solution. But before you vote for it, you'll want to be sure you're one of the people who ends up in a rent controlled unit - otherwise expect this policy to drive up your rent.