Welcome back to the deep dive. You know, there's
a specific feeling, I think we've all felt it,
where you open that envelope or check that portal
on the first of the month. Oh, yeah. It's that
tightness in your chest when you see the number
that takes the biggest bite out of your paycheck.
Rent. It is the universal pain point, isn't it?
It sits right at that uncomfortable intersection
of a basic human necessity. You know, having
a roof over your head and the brutal, often cold
efficiency of market forces. And because it's
so emotional, it's arguably the topic that generates
the most heat at dinner parties, in city council
meetings, and definitely in the comment sections
of the Internet. Oh, especially there. We are
talking, of course, about rent regulation. We
are. And I'm glad we're doing this deep dive
because the public conversation on this is usually,
well, it's usually a shouting match. It's so
binary. You're either for protecting the vulnerable
or you're for greedy landlords. There's no middle
ground. Exactly. But looking at the stack of
research, the history and the economic data we
have here, the reality is so much messier and
frankly fascinating. Right. It's not just a battle
between a tenant and a landlord. It's a story
about how cities survive, how history creates
policy traps, and the absolute brutality of the
law of unintended consequences. So our mission
today is to step out of the shouting match. We
want to understand the machine itself. The mechanics
of it. Exactly. The mechanics of how these laws
work, why the economic consensus is so overwhelmingly
negative, where that consensus gets challenged,
and then take a global tour from the Vatican
in the 1400s to the crumbling facades of modern
Cairo. It's going to be a wild ride. Before we
get to the economic brawls and the history lessons,
though, we have to do some housekeeping on the
definitions. Yes, definitely. Because I think
when I say rent control, most people have a very
specific image in their heads. They do. They
usually think of the French. apartment, a massive,
beautiful loft in the West Village that costs,
what, $300 a month because the lease was signed
in 1975 and the price is frozen in a block of
ice. Right. The frozen price tag. That's the
mental model. That is definitely one type. But
rent control is actually a sloppy term. In the
literature, the accurate umbrella term is rent
regulation. OK. And under that umbrella, the
government has a few different levers they can
pull. It's not just one thing. Okay, lay out
the toolkit for us. What are we talking about
here? The first lever is obviously price controls.
That's the limit on what a landlord can charge.
That's what we usually focus on. Oh, a cap? The
cap, exactly. But you can't really have price
controls without the second lever, eviction controls.
Which is also called just cause eviction. Correct.
Think about it. If I tell you, you can't raise
the rent on John, but I don't stop you from evicting
John, what are you going to do? I'm going to
evict John immediately and bring in Steve at
a higher price. It's a no -brainer. Exactly.
So the government has to step in and say, no,
you can only evict John for a legally valid reason.
Right. Like nonpayment or destroying the property.
You lose the right to end the tenancy at will.
Okay. So you have to have a reason. You have
to have a reason. Then you have the third lever,
maintenance obligations. Because if I can't raise
the rent, I'm probably not going to fix the boiler.
Precisely. You have no incentive to. So the state
has to mandate that the roof doesn't leak and
the heat works. Which makes sense. And finally,
you need oversight, a board or an ombudsman to
enforce all this. So someone has to police it.
Someone has to police it. It's a package deal.
You pull one lever, you have to pull them all.
It's an ecosystem. But within that price control
lever, the research makes a really big deal about.
generations of control. This feels like an important
distinction because I think people often argue
about the wrong one. It is vital. If you confuse
these, you confuse the whole debate. First generation
rent control is what economists call strict price
ceilings or a rent freeze. That's the block of
ice, the friend's apartment. Yes. The government
says rent is X dollars and it stays X dollars.
No increase is allowed or maybe very tiny ones
that don't keep up with inflation. This is what
we saw in wartime scenarios or in places like
Egypt, which we will get into later. And this
is pretty rare now, in the modern Western world
at least. Very rare. It's seen as a kind of nuclear
option. Okay, so if first gen is the freeze,
what is second gen? Because that's what most
cities have now, right? Right. Second generation
is technically called tenancy, rent control,
or vacancy decontrol. Break that down. Vacancy
decontrol. It means the control is on the tenancy,
not the unit. While you are living there, the
rent increases are capped, maybe at inflation,
or 2 -3%. You are protected. Okay, that sounds
pretty standard. But, and this is the massive
but, the moment you move out, the unit is decontrolled.
The landlord can reset the price to whatever
the market will pay for the next guy. Exactly.
The price snaps back to reality. Or... you know,
what the market calls reality. And is there a
middle ground, something between a hard freeze
and a total reset? There is. It's called vacancy
control without the D. Oh. That's where the price
is regulated, even between tenants. If you leave,
the landlord can only charge the new guy roughly
what you were paying. Maybe a small bump, but
not a reset to market rate. So to recap, first
gen is a total freeze. The price is locked. Second
gen vacancy decontrol protects the current tenant,
but resets for the new one. And vacancy control
tries to keep the price low for the new tenant,
too. You've got it. And the reason this matters
so much and why we're spending time on it is
that the economic incentives for the landlord
change drastically depending on which system
you're in. Which is the perfect segue. Let's
walk onto the battlefield then. Section one,
the economic battlefield. You brought up something
right away in the notes, the elephant in the
room. There is a stereotype that economists hate
rent control. Is that just a stereotype or is
it reality? It is one of the few things in the
social sciences that approaches a law of nature.
If you look at the data, the consensus is overwhelming.
It's actually staggering how much agreement there
is. Give me the numbers. Well, there was a famous
stratified random survey of 464 U .S. economists
back in 1992. Okay. These were members of the
American Economic Association, graduate students,
serious people. They were asked about the statement,
a ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality
of housing available. And what was the verdict?
93 % agreed. 93%. You can't get 93 % of people
to agree that the sky is blue. I know. In the
world of economics where people argue about everything,
that is essentially unanimity. Has that number
changed at all? I mean, 1992 was a while ago.
It really hasn't softened over time. A 2009 review
by Blair Jenkins looked at decades of literature
and concluded, quote, the economics profession
has reached a rare consensus. Rent control creates
many more problems than it solves. Creates more
problems than it solves. That is damning. It's
about as direct as you can get in an academic
paper. So walk us through the mechanism of failure
here. Why does it break things? We're not just
talking about landlords making less money. I'm
sure there are plenty of listeners playing the
world's smallest violin for the landlords right
now. Sure. And that's a fair emotional response.
But we have to look at the behavioral response.
It goes back to basic supply and demand. If you
cap the price of a good... in this case, an apartment
below what the market is willing to pay, you
reduce the producer's surplus. Which is just
fancy talk for profit. Fancy talk for profit,
yes. When you slash the return on investment,
the landlord responds rationally. They don't
just sit there and take the loss. First, they
stop maintaining the building. Right. Why replace
the carpets, fix the leaky faucet, or paint the
lobby if you can't raise the rent to cover the
cost? And more importantly, why do it if there
are 10 people lined up outside desperate for
the apartment anyway? So the quality drops because
there is no competition for the tenant? The tenant
is captive. Drastically. We call this housing
deterioration. Secondly, landlords pull units
off the market entirely. How do they do that?
If renting becomes a losing game, they might
convert the building to condos, sell it to owner
-occupiers, or even Airbnb it if the law allows.
They find an exit. So the actual quantity of
rental housing drops. You shrink the pool. You
shrink the pool. Which brings us to that incredibly
dark but apparently famous analogy you shared
with me. The bombing analogy. I read this and
thought, there is no way a serious academic said
this. But it was Saar Lindbeck, a Swedish economist,
in 1971. Right. He wasn't being hyperbolic just
for fun. He was looking at the post -war data
from Europe. He said, rent control appears to
be the most efficient technique presently known
to destroy a city, except for bombing. That is
heavy. He's literally saying the only thing worse
you can do to your city's housing stock is drop
bombs on it. It implies that the physical degradation
of the city under strict rent control looks indistinguishable
from a city that has been under siege. Crumbling
facades, broken infrastructure, that sort of
thing. But it wasn't just a Western capitalist
saying this, right? You found a quote from Vietnam
that I found even more striking. Yes. This is
crucial because it strips away the ideology.
This comes from a socialist government official.
In 1989, Vietnam's foreign minister, Nguyen Khatak,
was reflecting on the state of Hanoi. Yeah, and
Hanoi had very strict price controls, first -generation
stuff. Extremely strict. And he looked at the
crumbling buildings and said, the Americans couldn't
destroy Hanoi, but we have destroyed our city
by very low rents. Wow. He literally compared
his own policy to the bombing campaigns of the
Vietnam War. That's an incredible admission.
He realized that by keeping rents artificially
low, No one had the money or the incentive to
fix anything. The capital stock of the city,
the bricks and mortar was dissolving. So if the
math is so bad and if economists and even socialist
foreign ministers are shouting from the rooftops
that this destroys cities. Why do we still do
it? Why is it so popular? That is the million
dollar question. And to be fair, we have to look
at the counter arguments. There are dissenting
voices and there are valid reasons why voters
want this. Play devil's advocate. What's the
defense? Well, some economists argue that the
negative impact on supply isn't always statistically
significant. They'll say, you know, real world
markets are messy and don't always follow the
perfect textbook model. OK, so it's complicated
argument. A little bit. Yeah. But the strongest
argument. And the one that resonates most with
voters is the insurance value. Insurance. Explain
that. A 2021 study from Columbia Business School
frames it this way. Rent regulation acts as insurance
for low -income households against market volatility.
The free market is volatile. Rents can spike
20 % in a year if a tech company moves into town
or a new subway line opens. Right. Suddenly your
neighborhood is hot and you can't afford to live
there anymore. You're priced out. Exactly. Rent
regulation protects sitting tenants from those
shocks. It offers stability that the market refuses
to provide. It says you can stay in your home
and your costs will be predictable. So it's valuing
stability over efficiency. That's the tradeoff.
And it's a powerful emotional argument. And then
there's the anti -gentrification argument. Right,
which is often the main selling point. It is.
A 2016 study by the NYU Furman Center found that
while rent regulation is very bad at redistributing
wealth efficiently, because, as we'll see, rich
people often get these apartments too, it is
actually quite good at keeping sitting tenants
in their homes during market spikes. So if your
goal is solely keep grandma in her apartment,
it works. It works for grandma. But as we move
into Section 2, we have to ask, at what cost
to everyone else? What happens to the person
who isn't grandma but is trying to find their
first apartment? Let's talk about those costs.
Section 2, unintended consequences. Because when
you interfere with a complex system, the side
effects are often worse than the disease. We
have some brutal U .S. case studies here. Let's
go back to the 1940s. The WWII experiment. This
was a massive implementation of rent control.
In 1941, roughly 80 % of U .S. rental housing
was put under control to prevent gouging during
the war effort. Which sounds noble. You don't
want war profiteering. Of course. The intent
was solid. But the economic gravity didn't turn
off just because there was a war. Landlords did
the math. They realized they couldn't make money
renting under these caps. So what did they do?
They sold the unit. They exited the market en
masse. It sparked a massive sell -off. Now you
could argue, great, more home ownership. Which
some people did, right? They did. But it killed
the rental market. If you were a young person,
a soldier coming home, or someone who couldn't
afford a down payment, there were simply no apartments
to rent. The supply evaporated. It pushed the
market away from rentals entirely. But let's
look at something more recent. Because I think
people hear 1940s and think it's ancient history.
You found a fascinating comparison between St.
Paul and Minneapolis from just a couple years
ago. Yes. 2021 this feels like a perfect laboratory
experiment it really is a tale of two cities
you have twin cities geographically next to each
other similar economies similar demographics
in november 2021 st paul voters passed a very
strict rent control ordinance it capped increases
at three percent per year that sounds standard
for rent control but here's the kicker it had
no exemption for new construction and it included
vacancy control oh wow okay that's huge it's
huge it meant even if you built a brand new building,
you were capped at 3%. And if a tenant left,
you couldn't reset the rent to market rate. Oof.
If I'm a developer, I'm looking at that and sweating.
I'm taking on millions of dollars of debt to
build a building, and you're telling me I can
never raise rents to cover unexpected costs or
even just keep up with market demand. You're
not just sweating. You're leaving. The result
was immediate. Requests for new multifamily housing
permits in St. Paul dropped 80 percent. 80 percent.
That is a collapse. A total collapse. The capital
just vanished. Now look across the river to Minneapolis.
What did they do? Voters there authorized the
city council to craft an ordinance, but they
didn't enact one immediately, and it was widely
understood they would exempt new construction.
So the developers felt safe there. The rules
were predictable. They did. And the result. Permits
in Minneapolis went up 68 % in the same period.
That is staggering. St. Paul down 80%, Minneapolis
up 68%. You can literally see the money moving
across the river. It's a real -time lesson in
how capital flees uncertainty and strict caps.
If you tell developers you cannot make a return
on your investment here, they will simply go
five miles down the road where they can. And
the irony is, St. Paul wanted to make housing
affordable. But by stopping all new construction,
they guaranteed a shortage in the future. Which
creates scarcity, which drives prices up in the
long run. It's a cell phone. A massive cell phone.
Which brings us to San Francisco. The land of
the Golden Gate and the $1 ,000 closet. San Francisco
is the poster child for the gentrification paradox.
There was a major study in 2019 by researchers
at Stanford Diamond, McQuaid, and Keehan. What
did they look at? They looked at what happened
after San Francisco expanded rent control in
1994 to cover small multi -unit apartments that
were previously exempt. And again, the intent
was to protect renters and stop gentrification.
Right. Noble goal. But landlords are clever.
Faced with these new caps, they responded by
removing units from the rental market. How? Same
as in the 40s. They just sold them. Pretty much.
They converted them into condos, tenancies in
common, TIs, or moved into them themselves. The
study found that landlords removed 30 percent
of the regulated units from the rental stock.
30 percent. That's almost a third of the housing
stock just gone. Gone from the rental market.
And because the supply of rentals dropped by
15 percent citywide. The rents for everyone else,
the people in non -controlled units, went up
by 7%. Wait, hold on. So the law designed to
keep rents low actually raised rents for the
city as a whole? Yes. By shrinking the supply,
it made the remaining apartments more expensive
for everybody who wasn't lucky enough to have
a rent -controlled unit. And here's the paradox.
By converting rentals to expensive condos, who
do you think moved in? Wealthier people who could
afford to buy. Exactly. The policy actually fueled
the gentrification it was trying to stop. It
attracted higher income people who could afford
to buy while pushing out working class renters
who could no longer find a place to rent. That
is the ultimate task failed successfully moment.
You achieve the opposite of your stated goal.
It gets worse when you look at who benefits from
the units that stay. This is the haphazard targeting
issue. This is the Cambridge, Massachusetts story.
This is my favorite piece of trivia in the whole
research stack. It is wild, isn't it? Cambridge
had rent control from 1970 to 1994. And the assumption
is always that rent control helps the poor. As
it should. As it should. But because these units
aren't means tested, you don't have to prove
you're poor to get one. You just have to be lucky
enough to sign the least wealthy people often
end up in them. And you found a specific royal
example. I did. While rent control was active
in Cambridge, one of the tenants in a rent -controlled
apartment was Frederick, the crown prince of
Denmark. The actual crown prince, like future
king of Denmark. The crown prince he was studying
at Harvard. So you have local landlords in Massachusetts
subsidizing the housing of European royalty.
Exactly. And the data showed that at least 20
% of controlled units in Cambridge housed people
in the top half of the income bracket. Which
is just, it's absurd. It illustrates the problem
perfectly. Yeah. Benefit doesn't go to the person
who needs it most. It goes to the person who
gets there first. It's a lottery, not a social
safety net. That is a crucial distinction. It's
not based on need. It's based on tenure. If you
get in, you win. If you're late, you lose. Right.
And everyone who comes after you pays a higher
price because you took a unit off the market.
OK, so we've seen the economic wreckage in the
U .S. Let's zoom out. Section three, global perspectives
and history, because the U .S. is. Definitely
not the only place grappling with this. And you're
telling me this all started with the Pope? Believe
it or not, yes. One of the earliest recorded
instances of rent control comes from the papal
states in Rome around 1470. 1470. That is unexpected.
What was the context? It was actually a religious
protection measure. At the time, Jews in Rome
were forbidden from owning property. This meant
they were 100 percent dependent on Christian
landlords. Which puts them in a terrible bargaining
position. The landlord has total leverage. Total
leverage. They could charge whatever they wanted
and the tenants had nowhere else to go. They
could be exploited. So to prevent price gouging
and abuse, Pope Paul II and later Pope Sixtus
V in 1586 issued orders. They froze the rents
for Jewish tenants. So the first rent control
was basically an anti -discrimination law. In
a way, yes. It was about protecting a vulnerable
minority from a market where they had no power.
It's a surprising origin story that highlights
that the intent of these laws is almost always
noble. It's about protection. Speaking of protection
and where it can go wrong, we have to talk about
Egypt. This was the most shocking part of the
research for me. I've been to Cairo and I know
the buildings can be chaotic, but I didn't know
about old rent. Egypt is the extreme example
of first generation rent control. The rent freeze
gone on for too long. It's a cautionary tale
of what happens when you freeze a price and then
just walk away for 80 years. Set the scene for
us. So laws from the 1920s and 1940s froze rents
in Cairo and other cities to protect tenants.
But they didn't just freeze them for a few years.
They stayed frozen for decades. Through massive
inflation, political change, everything. Everything.
Then, in 1996, the government introduced new
rent, which deregulated new contracts. But they
left the old rent contracts alone because they
were terrified of mass evictions. So you have
a two -tier system. A massive one. Today, about
1 .6 million households, that's 7 % of Egypt,
are still onto these old rent contracts. And
because of inflation over the last 80 years,
the prices are absurd. How absurd? We are talking
about rents of 50 Egyptian pounds or less. That
is roughly USD $1 per month. Wait, pause. $1
a month for an apartment in Cairo? Yes, in the
heart of the city. You have sprawling, beautiful,
high -ceilinged apartments overlooking the Nile
that rent for the price of a pack of gum. That
is mind -blowing, but I assume the buildings
are falling apart. Completely. And this is the
tragedy. Why would a landlord fix the elevator,
paint the lobby, or repair the structural beams
when the total rental income for the whole building
is $20 a month? It wouldn't even cover the electricity
for the hallway lights. Exactly. Entire neighborhoods
are crumbling because of this. It's the new and
cut thatch, quote, come to life. The city is
destroying itself with low rents. It's a zombie
market. The buildings are dead, but people are
still living in them. But I read in the notes
that this is finally changing. It is, and it
is going to be painful. In 2025, a new law law,
12034 .25, was ratified to finally end this system.
What does the undoing look like? How do you unwind
something like that? It's a shock to the system.
Rents for these regulated apartments will jump
10 to 20 times in the first year alone. Then
they will rise 15 % annually until they hit market
rates. That sounds terrifying for the tenants.
It is. The source gives an anecdote of a tenant
who has lived there since 1984. Perfect analogy.
Okay, let's look at a place that usually values
order and structure, Germany. They do things
differently there. They seem to have found a
middle path. Germany is interesting because they
rely on the Mietzsche Beagle. Mietzschpiegel,
I love German compound words. What does it translate
to? It translates to rent mirror. Ooh, poetic.
I like that. It's a database, a mirror of the
market. It reflects the local reference rents
based on new contracts from the past four years.
So how does it work? Is it a hard cap? No. Instead
of hard cap like 3%, landlords can only increase
rent in line with this index, the Mietzschpiegel.
If the average rent in the neighborhood goes
up, you can raise yours. If it stays flat, you
stay flat. And there are limits to that, I assume.
Yes. They have strict usury laws. Any price rise
above 20 % over three years is illegal. So it's
not a freeze. It is a dampener. It smooths out
the spikes. Exactly. It allows the market to
move, but it prevents the shocks. Germany generally
balances tenants. Stability tenants have unlimited
contract durations. You can't just kick them
out with regulated increases. It worked reasonably
well. Except. Berlin tried to get fancy recently.
Ah, yes. The Berlin Mietendeckel or rent lid
of 2020. They tried a hard freeze. First generation
stuff. Same old story. It benefited the people
already living there. But the supply of new housing
for people looking for a home plummeted. The
number of apartments available for rent dropped
by more than half in one year. Wow. It was actually
repealed by the courts in 2021. It showed that
even in a well -regulated market like Germany,
hard freezes break the machine. Let's make a
quick stop in Australia. I feel like Australia
is usually a pretty free market with housing.
They are, with one exception, the Australian
Capital Territory, basically Canberra. The capital.
Right. It's the only place in Australia with
maximum rent increase caps tied to CPI. Everywhere
else Sydney, Melbourne relies on freedom of contract.
So if you're in Sydney, the landlord can say
rent is doubling next month and if you don't
like it, you leave. There are some notice periods,
but essentially, yes, it creates a very dynamic
but also very volatile market for renters. It's
the opposite of Egypt. High churn, high prices,
but generally high quality because landlords
have to compete for tenants who can leave at
any time. Okay, we've toured the world. We've
seen the wreckage of first -gen controls in Egypt,
the gentrification paradox in San Francisco,
and the collapse of permits in St. Paul. This
brings us to section four. Alternatives and solutions.
Right. Because the problem is real. Rents are
too high. People can't afford to live. If economists
hate rent control, what do they actually suggest?
We can't just say let the market rip and let
poor people be homeless. Absolutely not. And
economists aren't heartless. They just prefer
efficient tools. This is where we have to pivot
from price controls to supply and subsidy. OK.
If the goal is affordable housing, there are
two main levers economists prefer. The first
is the demand side. Vouchers. Explain that. How
is that different from rent control? Lisa Sturdivant's
review points this out. Rent control tries to
lower the price of the bread. Vouchers give the
hungry person money to buy the bread at the market
price. I like that analogy. It's much clearer.
We're talking about federal housing vouchers
or expanding the Low Income Housing Tax Credit,
LIHTC. Instead of breaking the price mechanism
of the market, you give money directly to the
poor people who need it. So let the landlord
charge $2 ,000, but give the low -income tenant
$1 ,000 to help pay for it. Precisely. This does
two things. One, it targets the help. Remember
the crown prince of Denmark? Hard to forget.
He wouldn't qualify for a voucher. You have to
prove income. So the money goes only to the poor.
Two, it keeps the incentive for the landlord
to maintain the building. Because they're still
getting the market rate. Exactly. If they're
getting market rate... partly from the tenant,
partly from the government. Yeah. They have the
cash flow to fix the roof. They don't pull the
unit off the market. That makes sense. It solves
the haphazard targeting and the housing deterioration
problems. But vouchers are expensive for the
government. What's the second lever? The supply
side. This is the argument from groups like the
Reason Foundation and the YMBY movement. Yes.
In my backyard. I've heard of them. They argue
the problem is simply a lack of supply. We aren't
building enough homes. Full stop. And why aren't
we? Is it just... greedy developers holding back.
Quite the opposite. Developers want to build.
The problem is zoning and regulation. It is incredibly
expensive and difficult to build in cities like
San Francisco or New York. If you have restrictive
zoning. height limits and endless community review
processes, you inflate the cost of development.
So if it costs me a million dollars just to get
the permit, I can only build a luxury condo to
make my money back. I can't build a starter home.
Exactly. You can't build affordable housing if
the land and legal fees cost a fortune. If you
deregulate the building process, simplify approvals,
allow more density, let people build taller,
you lower the cost of construction. This is the
housing first concept. Yes. Focus on increasing
the total pile of housing. If there is a surplus
of apartments, landlords have to compete for
tenants. When supply exceeds demand, prices fall
naturally. You don't need a law to lower the
price. The market does it for you. It sounds
so simple. Supply and demand, build more, prices
drop. Yet it seems so hard to do politically.
Because building more takes years. Rent control
can be passed overnight. Politicians like solutions
that voters can feel immediately. That is a profound
point. Rent control is a quick fix that causes
long term pain. Building supply is short term
pain construction noise, changing neighborhoods,
ugly cranes on the skyline for long term gain.
You nailed it. And humans are very bad at delayed
gratification. especially when it comes to politics.
So we are coming to the end of our deep dive.
Let's try to synthesize all this. We've gone
from the papal states protecting Jewish tenants
to the modern rent mirror in Berlin. We've seen
that strict price freezes, first generation control
are almost universally disastrous. They are the
bombing effect. They kill supply. They kill quality.
And undoing them like in Egypt is a nightmare.
We've seen that. Second generation vacancy decontrol
is the modern standard, but it has its own demons.
It can fuel gentrification, incentivizing landlords
to convert to condos. Right. And it creates this
weird lottery system where the crown prince gets
a cheap apartment while a working class family
pays market rate next door. It creates an insider
outsider market. Yeah. If you are inside, you
are safe. If you are outside trying to get in,
the door is locked. And the consensus from economists,
93 percent of them, is that price ceilings reduce
the quantity and quality of housing. It's a tradeoff.
You buy stability for the current tenant at the
expense of everything else. That's the summary
in a nutshell. So I want to leave our listeners
with a final thought. We always try to end with
something provocative. Here's what I want you
to think about. When you hear a debate about
rent control. It is almost always framed as the
greedy landlord versus the struggling tenant.
Right. It's a story of profit versus people.
Right. That's the movie script. Good guy, bad
guy. But the data suggests the real conflict
is different. The real conflict is between the
current tenant and the future tenant. Oh, that's
interesting. The current tenant wants to stay
put, pay a low price, and never be forced to
move. Rent control is great for them. But the
future tenant? The future tenant is the young
graduate, the immigrant family, the person moving
for a new job. They can't find a place to live
because no one is moving and nothing is being
built. Rent control locks the door in their face
to protect the person already inside. So the
question isn't just, are landlords greedy? The
question is, who does the city owe more to? The
person who is already there or the person who
wants to come? That is the question. And there
is no easy answer. That is going to keep me up
tonight. Thank you for taking this deep dive
with us. My pleasure. It was a lot to get through.
And thank you to you, the listener. Check your
lease, check your local laws, and we will see
you next time.