, Columnist
Rent Control Used to Work – During Wartime
It isn’t designed to redress today’s shortage of affordable housing.
A wartime strategy.
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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.
The debate today is framed as a philosophical disagreement about the relative merits of free markets and state regulation. But that obscures the real reason rent control was ever tried in the first place: war.