It will not help you find an affordable place to live, it will help those who already have existing leases hold on to them forever. Rent control does not create an abundance of housing, it just creates a constituency of people that gets a better deal than those who don't.
Correct, rent control in the Boston area created haves and have-nots. It was great for those lucky enough to get in, but the rest of us were effectively subsidizing them.
It’s probably the case in CA now. Just want to mention that rent control in Switzerland extends to future tenants. It can be implemented so that it gives protections.
Except in practice people can't find affordable places with rent control because nobody is willing to leave their below market rate place. The real problem with it though is that it does not in any way fix the root cause of the problem, which is lack of supply.
> It’s here to ensure people can still find affordable places to live.
Rent control does the opposite. It radically reduces choices and increase on price on people looking for a place to live.
Rent control chooses a small handful of existing renters to be winners. And it makes everyone else a loser. Except it's also shitty renters, because it traps them in place. Sure it gives them a home somewhere. But it denies them opportunity to move to another city, or even the other side of time, to pursue opportunity.
Housing is a strictly zero sum game. When you have more people who want houses in an area than there are houses you will have winners and losers.
Rent control chooses certain people to be winners and other people to be losers. It does exactly nothing to increase the number of winners. Furthermore it creates disincentives to the creation of new housing, which means fewer winners in the future. Even worse, for the winners it does select it puts them at a long term disadvantage by trapping them into a non-optimal location.
The only solution to “not enough housing” is “more housing”. Rent control is actively harmful to this goal.
> if strict can give equal chances to tenants no matter your background.
The GP's point is that it gives equal chances to tenants to stay. New tenants do not benefit from rent control, they instead are hurt by the higher prices due to lower supply.
Which is why rent control doesn't address the root causes of the housing problems, and in fact only makes things worse in the long run. It's just virtue signaling without regard to the results.
The US economy is the driver of the world economy, and has been for quite some time and it's why we see so much innovation of entire new sectors in the US. (Yes, you can see sustained higher growth for a time in some other places, like China, because starting from a lower level allows for piggybacking in the same way the US economy grew with regard to Europe in the 19th century.)
The reason mature European economies do not come close to entrepreneurship and the rate of innovation in the US economy is because widespread govt regulation and taxes across the board stifles economic options for investors.
It is simply not true that housing and employment laws in other places "works great", it's a tradeoff, and if the US follows that path the world will become a less good place for everybody because Europe and Asia will no longer have an innovative capitalist petri dish to follow and leverage from.
ycombinator, where standard econ theory gets downvoted by people who've never taken econ. Here's a challenge, explain the history of the US stock market vs world stock markets and US venture capital vs world venture capital better than I did.
It’s the same concept as free healthcare or free education. It’s here to ensure people can still find affordable places to live.
You can’t make everything an investment if you want a healthy society.