Cities Toy With Rent Control & Housing Suicide?

Skyrocketing rents are making pols panic. Yet, WSJ says Orlando’s rent control proposal risks “housing suicide” & DC’s version might help explain the dearth of affordable housing & homeless epidemic there. Solution anyone?

The paper’s editorial board put it this way: “One consequence of inflation is the bad policy temptations that come with it. Lawmakers in urban hot spots are flirting with rent control again and a coming vote in Orlando, Fla, will give residents a chance to show they’ve learned more about economics than have local leaders.” According the editors, rent control inevitably is “deadly for the supply & upkeep of rental properties.”

Put another way, rent controls may temporarily fix spiraling rents, but gentrifies the area since owners will stop building new units or upkeeping old ones so that everyone is a loser in the long run. Take DC’s Foggy Bottom. Please. The District’s rent control laws are so demanding in the name of protecting the poor that many poor have nowhere to go to find affordable housing, except to take to the tent cities on its streets or, ironically, suburbia across the Potomac.

Davd Soul