nah man, this argument gets torn apart because "rent control doesn't apply to new developments so it's neutral on new development"

What it does is it takes rental units off the market because being faced with the maintenance risk of 5 or 20 year or however long the tenant stays fixed income vs. convert it to owner-occupied housing and take a large payout now, landlords often choose to ellis up the place.

And if they don't remove rental stock, then they're incentivized to provide shittier service -- delay repairs, delay upkeep, ignore tenant requests -- to encourage the rent-controlled tenant to move elsewhere so they can reset their price.

>this argument gets torn apart because "rent control doesn't apply to new developments so it's neutral on new development"

Most implementations of rent control make it difficult to redevelop those properties into higher density housing. After all, if you could remove people from those units to redevelop, rent control wouldn't be worth much. This reduces total housing available which drives up prices elsewhere. Rent control is always a massive wealth transfer to a couple of winners from a massive number of losers.