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  roenxi
  > This paper studies the effects of rent control on the housing wealth of renters, landlords, and homeowners. Over the nine months following the passage of rent control in St. Paul, Minnesota in 2021, average property values fell by 4.4% to 5.8%.This seems like too short-term a study. The argument against artificially holding prices down is that people won't produce as much as they would otherwise and people won't be able to get the thing they would otherwise buy. So what we're predicting a rent control policy will do is cause a shortage of rental accommodation in the area.Now how that expresses itself in an accounting sense, who knows (probably the economists). Good question to study. But I doubt the impacts of rent control would appear in the market this quickly, it'd take years for the market signals to be measurable. Initially rent controls will probably be set near the previously ideal market price, I'd guess there are a lot of 12 month leases and housing construction projects probably don't reset that quickly either.
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  jhallenworld
  When Boston ended rent control in the late 90s, all of the sudden the landlords invested in their goldmine buildings and generally improved the city. It sucks for those trying to rent or buy (including me, I paid 60% more for a house in 2002 than what it was worth in 1996), but the city has certainly had a renaissance.IMHO, the problem now is bad zoning. The rich car-centric suburbs are preventing denser housing- to their own financial detriment. A recent fight is that the state has forced them to allow higher density housing around commuter rail stops. Similar fights about rail trails, future abutters are afraid of change but they are valuable everywhere they exist- in that they are a desirable feature and raise your house's value.Another problem is that they overbuilt $100/sqft bio-lab space. These are sitting empty, and the owners refuse to lower the rent.. I don't understand how the owners remain solvent.
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  hnav
  One effect of rent-control that I have observed in San Francisco is that well-off people get into baller apartments with the intention of keeping them forever. Over time the rental rate gets inflated away to almost nothing, the person buys a mansion in suburbia, keeping their rent controlled penthouse as a pied-a-terre. In theory landlords would be looking to petition for eviction but that's usually not what happens.
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  devolving-dev
  People like to look at rent control from a purely economic lens, but the sociopolitical aspect must also be considered. A suboptimal economic outcome might actually be optimal when all factors are considered. Social harmony and a feeling of hope for underprivileged residents are hard to value, but we must admit that they do have value.
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  varenc
  Important context: This paper is from 2023. In 2025, St. Paul massively rolled back rent control restrictions.Their rent control used to have no exemptions, but now it's become very similar to SF rent control. Strict limit on how much rent can go up for current tenants, but can reset close to market rate when there's a 'just cause' vacancy. And all buildings built after X date are exempt entirely. (X=2004 in St. Paul, X=1979 in SF). Developers argued that any rent control at all limited their ability to finance housing projects.I think results of studies like this were hugely influential to the changes in rent control that followed.
• RobLach
  This seems like a lot of work looking at mostly housing prices during peak covid which is hardly a generalizable situation.
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  daft_pink
  I feel the core issue isn’t wealth redistribution, it’s that rent controls create severe mismatches in supply and demand.
• gacgacgac
  Nine months of data during a pandemic and nationwide civil unrest during the first year of a new term of a new President.I guess I struggle to see how that's controlling enough variables over a long enough time span to be meaningful.
• ryukoposting
  Instead of repeating myself, here's the link:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48524204Don't use Twin Cities property values in the early 2020s to draw conclusions about anything related to policy or economics. What you're actually measuring is the after shock of race riots.Also, RHAWA is a landlord lobbying group.
• adverbly
  IMO nothing even comes close to beating a land value tax with a citizens dividend for fixing housing and wealth distribution challenges.
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  ggm
  Without injection of new housing stock by the state, by coops or other agencies than BTR capital investors, it's highly likely to be a weaponised outcome to prove rent controls don't work.If the construction strike by commercial investors is replaced by public housing then the better outcome can emerge.
• elchief
  well it's not a free market anyway, and supply has been severely constrained for decades, so I'm okay with not screwing renters
• pksebben
  "Assessing effects of rent control on wealth is hard, so we threw most of that out and just used housing prices. Also, we're fairly sure that our results are good because there was nothing special happening in St. Paul in 2021 that we could figure. See this scatterplot that looks like inflation, note that the statistics we put just below it also don't look interesting but we've tied them to how rent controls are at the same time socialist and also evil and capitalist. We are objective parties to this because we say we are, please ignore the TLD we're serving this on."You can almost hear yakitty sax playing in the background. I bet if you met the researchers you could honk their nose.
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  SilverElfin
  Why not just redistribute directly? If the concern is that some existing residents will no longer be able to afford things, give long time residents a subsidy voucher.
• anon
  undefined
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  vlovich123
  > Over the nine months following the passage of rent control in St. Paul, Minnesota in 2021, average property values fell by 4.4% to 5.8%This to me is the big one. So in addition to rents being more affordable (even if wealthier renters capture most of the gains) limiting the rental market profits also makes houses more affordable to buy? The paper is trying to argue this is bad, but I’m not seeing it.It’s almost like “rent-seeking behavior” is a negative pejorative of an actor’s actions that negatively influence the market.
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  doctorpangloss
  i see nobody read the paper.> Similarly, we need to consider any one-time confounding events in control cities. Most notably, Minneapolis would be a natural control for St. Paul. However, in addition to the ballot measure on rent control, Minneapolis’s ballot also included referenda on mayoral power and policing. These confounding events mean that if property values in St. Paul changed relative to Minneapolis, we could not attribute the change to rent control.their mistake is that they excluded Minneapolis for a bullshit reason here. you might as well do the analysis and then tell us. of course, they did, and found all the same effects as st. paul despite no rent control, so they chose not to talk about it.
• jmyeet
  From the abstract:> Over the nine months following the passage of rent control in St. Paul, Minnesota in 2021, average property values fell by 4.4% to 5.8%.Why is this bad? Pretty much every Western society has fallen into the trap of raising property prices as a politcal imperative. People who own 1 (maybe 2) homes believe it's good for them but it only benefits very wealthy people who hoard land.The real problem is that ever-increasing property prices destroys the fabric of society. It's a wealth transfer from the next generation to older and wealthier people that creates a drain on their entire lives. It's justified by people arguing the current young people will be able to do that to the generation after them. But this can't go on forever.Want to know why eating out is so expensive? Why third spaces have disappeared? Why basically everything has gotten expensive? it's housing prices. Commercial rent is an input into everything that you buy. Higher costs mean higher wages that need to be paid, which is also an input into everything you need to buy. And the only one who is winning out of all of this is the landlord. If the commercial rent is too low well then it'll get torn down or converted into residential real estate because that's more profitable.You know who realized this? Xi Jinping [1]:> Houses are for living, not for speculationSo the Chinese property speculation bubble was quietly popped a decade ago and Chinese real estate has been in a severe and prolonged recession ever since as the market corrects. What's funny is media coverage points this out like it's a problem. It's not. It's intentional.And if you think that's a purely socialist/communist idea, tell that to Adam Smith [2]:> As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce.He had this in common with Mao [3].So if Marxists, Leninists, Maoists and capitalists all agree that landlords are parasitic, what are we doing?There's a British former wealth manager and economist named Henry Fudge who has done the math on how the housing market is a "rentier black hole" (as he describes it) on the UK economy and has hollowed out manufacturing as an inevitable consequence when returns on housing exceed all asset classes. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecies and housing enjoys significant tax advantages and government protections. He calls it The Housing Theory of Everything [4].Rent control is a bandaid. The solution here is for the government to become a significant provider of housing, as is the case in Vienna [5] and to stop treating housing as a speculative asset. Attacks on rent control are generally a thinly-veiled effort to increase landlord profits however.We're rapidly re-inventing feudalism here with 1 (and soon more to come I'm sure) trillionaire who will increasingly hoard all the land and assets, leaving the rest of us as impoverished tenant workers who own nothing. Most call this neofeudalism for this reason.[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...[2]: https://www.prosper.org.au/geoists-in-history/adam-smith-on-...[3]: https://thirdworldtruth.medium.com/not-just-mao-but-adam-smi...[4]: https://henryfudgeofficial.substack.com/p/the-housing-theory...[5]: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-soc...
• chasebank
  [dead]
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  dmurvihill
  Renters win, landlords lose. Seems like a win to me, idk