> 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.
> 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.
Hard disagree. Rational investors have no problem whatsoever projecting the impact to future cash flows and adjusting the amount they're willing to pay now. That's like saying the stock market wouldn't respond quickly to changes in next year's tax law.
> Rational investors have no problem whatsoever projecting the impact to future cash flows and adjusting the amount they're willing to pay now.
That's not accounting for the time value of money.
Suppose you have a rental unit and before rent control you were planning to rent it out. That now has far less attractive returns and it suddenly makes more sense to sell it as a condo to an occupant rather than keeping it to rent it out. Likewise, other prospective landlords no longer want to buy it at the previous market price (returns went down and they can invest in stocks or housing in some other city instead), so the short-term effect is to increase the number of property sellers and decrease the number of buyers. Short-term, property values going down is the expected thing.
But construction going down is also the expected thing, for the same reason. If property values are lower then the number of viable construction projects is lower and less construction happens.
The lack of construction then continues until rents, even after rent control, are high enough to justify more construction, i.e. are even higher than they were originally, because now to justify the same investment as before you need the current rent to be high enough to account for the inability to increase it later. And with less construction happening, that's the natural result in a growing area. More people have to bid on the same number of units, rents go up. So the short-term effect is lower real estate prices, the long-term effect is higher.
Now you say, if we expect real estate costs to be higher later, why don't investors take advantage? Which is the "time value of money" issue. If you invest there now because the prices will be high later, what do you do with the property in the meantime? If you don't rent it out, paying $1 today to get $1 in ten or twenty years is dumb, so you only buy if the current price is at a discount. If you do rent it out, then you'd be stuck trying to sell a building with a rent-controlled tenant, which isn't worth as much as the same building as empty as you bought it which you could sell as condos or rent out at current rents instead of price controlled ones, and then you still need a discount. And so the current seller has to provide a discount even if the real estate costs will be higher in a few years.
In a highly liquid commodity market full of professional traders, I'd agree. But the housing market isn't that liquid over 9 months and there are a lot of small timers. It seems more likely there'd be some sort of initial wobble as sophisticated participants reposition, then a period of calm, then the actual impacts set in over a few years.
It might not happen that way - someone does need to check - but at 9 months I wouldn't read much in to this study. The physical market would still be reorganising and it seems entirely possible that the eventual impacts are just different than what this study suggests. I'd want a period of more like 5 years to be confident that the data had given everyone in the market enough time to feel the impacts of artificially low rents and reposition appropriately.
Except the housing market, especially the rental market, is still significantly driven by small rental property owners and is a significant source of generational wealth transfer.
Starting with the assumption that all or even most investors / actors are rational is a continuing pox on both economic scholarship and societal thinking
Moving prices is not the same as moving the market, and famously the market might cause them to go insolvent faster then the market goes rational. Which would mean that they weren’t actually rational and this is all circular reasoning?
The plot on page 39 certainly looks like the St Paul market turned somewhere around July of 2020, over a year before the rent control, and the downward trend accelerated over the next couple of years. I'm skeptical of the authors' ability to tease out the contribution of rent control to a process that had already begun well before the alleged causal event.
I lived there at the time. The George Floyd riots were in late May/early June 2020. I went to the protests by the police station in the Powderhorn neighborhood, that's the police station that got burned down. I got the hell out before that, though.
Most of the damage was concentrated in Minneapolis, a little south of the river. But what happens in Minneapolis affects St. Paul, and vice versa. St. Paul wasn't unscathed, either. Property values dipped as a result of the riots, and I'd go find more evidence of that if it wasn't just taken as a fact by the people who live there.
There's George Floyd Square, an ad-hoc memorial at the intersection where he was murdered. For reasons beyond me, this was a source of controversy for well over a year, and I know a lot of MN righties who took the city's willingness to leave the memorial there as "capitulating to crime" or something.
There was also an arson on a construction site in downtown St. Paul later that summer that spooked a lot of folks too.
In short, don't use Twin Cities property values in the early 2020s to make generalizations about economics or policy. It took years for those scars to heal. Things didn't really go back to normal until 2023 at the absolute earliest.
It's terribly hard to isolate rent because of the supply/demand shock (in geographically dependent directions) that COVID had on the market. It made people move, a lot of people got a lot of free money and were out of work, among many other changes.
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.
> In theory landlords would be looking to petition for eviction but that's usually not what happens.
Are landlords allowed to increase rents when the tenant changes? If so then yes, I would expect them to do so, so if they don't, there needs to be some other explanation.
If they don't, then obviously they'll prefer to keep their long-term, pays-on-time, probably-not-wrecking-the-place existing tenant.
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.
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.
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.
The Massachusetts law requiring cities/towns to build high-density housing around commuter rail stops neglected one thing. There's no open space. To build high-density housing, the city or state would have to buy out the existing landowners, demolish the existing property, and then build anew.
They also neglected the effect of travel time on behavior. Back in the day, I was commuting from a rich suburb to Cambridge, and to get to work on time, I had to get up early to accommodate a 30-minute commute to the train station, wait for the purple line and the red line, and then walk three-quarters of a mile. When I saw how little traffic was on the road, I said, "F it," and drove to work in the same amount of time as it took me to get to the train station.
In the Biolab space, it was a little overbuilt, and now it's tremendously overbuilt because of the killing off of NIH grants and subsequent reduction in investment in the biotech sector. I suspect the reason they don't drop the rent is that it would cause a bit of unraveling. You drop the rent; that changes the valuation of your building, which may mean you're underwater on the loan, the bank calls the loan, et cetera, et cetera. Then, similar properties would suffer devaluation and a similar unwinding. And if you agree with the contagion theory of deflationary environments, it'll all unwind all the way through your 401k and other investments. Sadly, the billionaires would be untouched.
This is why you need a two prong approach: city-led redevelopment or redevelopment incentives on top of rent stabilization. Boston is not rapidly growing new housing relative to the number of people who are trying to live there. The median rent price per capita of the Boston metro is much, much higher than NY metro, nearly 4x in fact.[1] Boston should not be as expensive as New York, when the latter has rent stabilization (and even some old apartments still under rent control) and the former does not.
> I don't understand how the owners remain solvent.
I think that tells you everything you need to know about who's renting them out.
The funding for the types of infrastructure that is made less efficient by sprawl needs to come from property taxes. Those taxes should then be scaled appropriately to reflect the amount of extra spending on sprawly infrastructure.
Also, when the topic of rent control, sorry, rent stabilization, comes up here in the Boston area now people won't allow for inflation adjustments. I'd be okay with a scheme that allowed for automatic inflation adjustment plus some float. But instead they're always proposed in a way that has a max cap. This means that an owner could potentially start losing money. And leads to the flip side of what you describe.
When I point this out in r/boston, cambridgema, and somerville I get downvoted to oblivion because obviously fuck the landlord class. But why on earth would anyone start renting a place if they know they could get soaked over time?
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.
> but can reset close to market rate when there's a 'just cause' vacancy.
Unfortunate policy, and generating weird incentives to get people to leave!
In Queensland (not exactly perfectly managing the rental crisis but...) their policies include not being able to raise rent more than once every 12 months (leases tend to be 12 months). Importantly it's linked to the property, not the tenants.
There's no actual cap in practice on how much you can raise it by ("reasonable" I believe is the nonfalsifiable term used) but it doesn't generate perverse incentives to kick people out
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.
That depends on the market. I’m not familiar with St Paul Minnesota, but here in Perth, Western Australia this is raised as an argument every time someone proposes anything to do with rolling back investor tax breaks. That and “there will be no rentals!”
The truth of the situation here is that there is more than enough demand for new housing anyway, much of it gets directly financed by wannabe homeowners, that ‘investment’ goes 90% into existing stock, not new builds, and that investment properties actually create rental demand as investors crowd out would-be owner-occupiers from both existing houses and new-builds opportunities.
In Melbourne, where measures to reduce the attractiveness of investment have already happened, the price of housing has levelled off comparative to other capitals in Aus, and rental availability has actually gone up.
The underlying problem is of course supply, but there appears to be a limit to how fast the building industry can actually build more stock, so with huge demand and limited supply, we don’t need to encourage as much speculation or landlordism in the market.
"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.
> 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.
I'm not picking up any subjective, simplistic labeling like "good" or "bad." Are we reading the same paper?
Haven't fully read the paper, just the introduction and skimmed through the rest, but it seems they're merely observing that a rent control law went into effect, and given some control variables, it seems like it depressed property values.
Their findings also suggest that while the wealth transfer of rent control factor is real -- that is, landlords are impacted more and existing renters see relative benefit -- that effect is greater among higher-income renters and less among lower income renters.
Second paragraph in the Conclusion:
"While the negative wealth effects for owners are large, our results show the positive effects of the law are poorly targeted. Though the intention is to benefit lower income renters, we find that the largest benefits are received in the neighborhoods of the city in which renters have higher incomes, are less likely to be minorities, and have more education. To the extent that price drops for rental properties reflect future rent savings, and thus housing wealth gains for tenants, our results suggest that the largest cost savings are going to be realized in the neighborhoods with the richest, most educated, and least diverse owners."
How do you quantify "incentive"? Is a landlord really looking at 5% lower property value and deciding it's not worth investing? Is this even true in aggregate?
It is a major paradigm in economics that if you change this by X% it will change something else by Y% and to estimate that ratio. It may be that people don’t really think that way: economic growth seems to be continuous and exponential in character whereas economic dislocations are discontinuous in character.
I think of how I was absolutely shocked when a Big Mac meal was $10 during the pandemic (I think it cost about $2.50 the first time I bought it) and didn’t think I was going to buy 4% less of it but rather I skipped the fries.
Well, there's 2 ways to become a landlord: to buy a house or to build a house. I was focused only on the second way.
The cost of the wood and the labor needed to build the house is unaffected by the rent control, so if cost remains the same, but the reward (or "revenue") from building the house decrease from $100K to $95K, then fewer houses will get built.
So they're losing out on a few dozen new units, but it is made up for by renters across the board having to pay less rent and thus having more money to put into the economy? Seems like a good trade to me?
> 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.
This makes me wonder if these cities are a good study subject in the first place.
Is this a metro area with serious rental price pressure where rent stabilization is greatly altering the market conditions, or is housing so available to begin with that it’s more of a feel-good legislation that doesn’t shift prices around?
It looks like from a quick search that over half of people in this metro area own their own home.
I imagine that rent control in many Midwestern metros is effectively pointless. The rent is already being controlled by flat or declining populations, cheap land, and high homeownership rates.
> 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.
The key to understanding the effects of rent control is understanding the Law of Supply and Demand.
Artificially holding down rents will result in housing shortages. The lower the rent controlled price, the worse the shortage.
If the rent goes too low, the building owner will stop doing maintenance. Eventually, the building gets abandoned.
> 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.
Hard disagree. Rational investors have no problem whatsoever projecting the impact to future cash flows and adjusting the amount they're willing to pay now. That's like saying the stock market wouldn't respond quickly to changes in next year's tax law.
You probably won't see new commencement of building projects, but it probably doesn't mean ongoing projects would be scrapped...
And these things have a lead time of years
> Rational investors have no problem whatsoever projecting the impact to future cash flows and adjusting the amount they're willing to pay now.
That's not accounting for the time value of money.
Suppose you have a rental unit and before rent control you were planning to rent it out. That now has far less attractive returns and it suddenly makes more sense to sell it as a condo to an occupant rather than keeping it to rent it out. Likewise, other prospective landlords no longer want to buy it at the previous market price (returns went down and they can invest in stocks or housing in some other city instead), so the short-term effect is to increase the number of property sellers and decrease the number of buyers. Short-term, property values going down is the expected thing.
But construction going down is also the expected thing, for the same reason. If property values are lower then the number of viable construction projects is lower and less construction happens.
The lack of construction then continues until rents, even after rent control, are high enough to justify more construction, i.e. are even higher than they were originally, because now to justify the same investment as before you need the current rent to be high enough to account for the inability to increase it later. And with less construction happening, that's the natural result in a growing area. More people have to bid on the same number of units, rents go up. So the short-term effect is lower real estate prices, the long-term effect is higher.
Now you say, if we expect real estate costs to be higher later, why don't investors take advantage? Which is the "time value of money" issue. If you invest there now because the prices will be high later, what do you do with the property in the meantime? If you don't rent it out, paying $1 today to get $1 in ten or twenty years is dumb, so you only buy if the current price is at a discount. If you do rent it out, then you'd be stuck trying to sell a building with a rent-controlled tenant, which isn't worth as much as the same building as empty as you bought it which you could sell as condos or rent out at current rents instead of price controlled ones, and then you still need a discount. And so the current seller has to provide a discount even if the real estate costs will be higher in a few years.
The stock market has liquidity, fungibility, low transaction costs, etc etc. https://jlcollinsnh.com/2013/05/29/why-your-house-is-a-terri...
I think you're wildly overestimating the rationality of investors.
In a highly liquid commodity market full of professional traders, I'd agree. But the housing market isn't that liquid over 9 months and there are a lot of small timers. It seems more likely there'd be some sort of initial wobble as sophisticated participants reposition, then a period of calm, then the actual impacts set in over a few years.
It might not happen that way - someone does need to check - but at 9 months I wouldn't read much in to this study. The physical market would still be reorganising and it seems entirely possible that the eventual impacts are just different than what this study suggests. I'd want a period of more like 5 years to be confident that the data had given everyone in the market enough time to feel the impacts of artificially low rents and reposition appropriately.
Except the housing market, especially the rental market, is still significantly driven by small rental property owners and is a significant source of generational wealth transfer.
Starting with the assumption that all or even most investors / actors are rational is a continuing pox on both economic scholarship and societal thinking
It doesn’t require all or most investors to act rational. A small percentage of rational actors still moves prices.
Moving prices is not the same as moving the market, and famously the market might cause them to go insolvent faster then the market goes rational. Which would mean that they weren’t actually rational and this is all circular reasoning?
actors are in aggregate rational and self interested, but emotions are important.
The plot on page 39 certainly looks like the St Paul market turned somewhere around July of 2020, over a year before the rent control, and the downward trend accelerated over the next couple of years. I'm skeptical of the authors' ability to tease out the contribution of rent control to a process that had already begun well before the alleged causal event.
I lived there at the time. The George Floyd riots were in late May/early June 2020. I went to the protests by the police station in the Powderhorn neighborhood, that's the police station that got burned down. I got the hell out before that, though.
Most of the damage was concentrated in Minneapolis, a little south of the river. But what happens in Minneapolis affects St. Paul, and vice versa. St. Paul wasn't unscathed, either. Property values dipped as a result of the riots, and I'd go find more evidence of that if it wasn't just taken as a fact by the people who live there.
There's George Floyd Square, an ad-hoc memorial at the intersection where he was murdered. For reasons beyond me, this was a source of controversy for well over a year, and I know a lot of MN righties who took the city's willingness to leave the memorial there as "capitulating to crime" or something.
There was also an arson on a construction site in downtown St. Paul later that summer that spooked a lot of folks too.
In short, don't use Twin Cities property values in the early 2020s to make generalizations about economics or policy. It took years for those scars to heal. Things didn't really go back to normal until 2023 at the absolute earliest.
It's terribly hard to isolate rent because of the supply/demand shock (in geographically dependent directions) that COVID had on the market. It made people move, a lot of people got a lot of free money and were out of work, among many other changes.
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.
> In theory landlords would be looking to petition for eviction but that's usually not what happens.
Are landlords allowed to increase rents when the tenant changes? If so then yes, I would expect them to do so, so if they don't, there needs to be some other explanation.
If they don't, then obviously they'll prefer to keep their long-term, pays-on-time, probably-not-wrecking-the-place existing tenant.
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.
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.
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.
The Massachusetts law requiring cities/towns to build high-density housing around commuter rail stops neglected one thing. There's no open space. To build high-density housing, the city or state would have to buy out the existing landowners, demolish the existing property, and then build anew.
They also neglected the effect of travel time on behavior. Back in the day, I was commuting from a rich suburb to Cambridge, and to get to work on time, I had to get up early to accommodate a 30-minute commute to the train station, wait for the purple line and the red line, and then walk three-quarters of a mile. When I saw how little traffic was on the road, I said, "F it," and drove to work in the same amount of time as it took me to get to the train station.
In the Biolab space, it was a little overbuilt, and now it's tremendously overbuilt because of the killing off of NIH grants and subsequent reduction in investment in the biotech sector. I suspect the reason they don't drop the rent is that it would cause a bit of unraveling. You drop the rent; that changes the valuation of your building, which may mean you're underwater on the loan, the bank calls the loan, et cetera, et cetera. Then, similar properties would suffer devaluation and a similar unwinding. And if you agree with the contagion theory of deflationary environments, it'll all unwind all the way through your 401k and other investments. Sadly, the billionaires would be untouched.
This is why you need a two prong approach: city-led redevelopment or redevelopment incentives on top of rent stabilization. Boston is not rapidly growing new housing relative to the number of people who are trying to live there. The median rent price per capita of the Boston metro is much, much higher than NY metro, nearly 4x in fact.[1] Boston should not be as expensive as New York, when the latter has rent stabilization (and even some old apartments still under rent control) and the former does not.
> I don't understand how the owners remain solvent.
I think that tells you everything you need to know about who's renting them out.
[1]: https://constructioncoverage.com/research/cities-with-the-mo...
The funding for the types of infrastructure that is made less efficient by sprawl needs to come from property taxes. Those taxes should then be scaled appropriately to reflect the amount of extra spending on sprawly infrastructure.
Also, when the topic of rent control, sorry, rent stabilization, comes up here in the Boston area now people won't allow for inflation adjustments. I'd be okay with a scheme that allowed for automatic inflation adjustment plus some float. But instead they're always proposed in a way that has a max cap. This means that an owner could potentially start losing money. And leads to the flip side of what you describe.
When I point this out in r/boston, cambridgema, and somerville I get downvoted to oblivion because obviously fuck the landlord class. But why on earth would anyone start renting a place if they know they could get soaked over time?
Sure, when you kick out all the poor people, the city definitely does look richer.
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.
> but can reset close to market rate when there's a 'just cause' vacancy.
Unfortunate policy, and generating weird incentives to get people to leave!
In Queensland (not exactly perfectly managing the rental crisis but...) their policies include not being able to raise rent more than once every 12 months (leases tend to be 12 months). Importantly it's linked to the property, not the tenants.
There's no actual cap in practice on how much you can raise it by ("reasonable" I believe is the nonfalsifiable term used) but it doesn't generate perverse incentives to kick people out
This seems like a lot of work looking at mostly housing prices during peak covid which is hardly a generalizable situation.
IMO nothing even comes close to beating a land value tax with a citizens dividend for fixing housing and wealth distribution challenges.
I feel the core issue isn’t wealth redistribution, it’s that rent controls create severe mismatches in supply and demand.
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.
Because it goes directly into the pockets of the landlords?
People can argue about whether that's what should happen, and there are nuances on both sides there, but that is undeniably what will happen.
We could like build more houses though
well it's not a free market anyway, and supply has been severely constrained for decades, so I'm okay with not screwing renters
Renters win, landlords lose. Seems like a win to me, idk
The current cohort of renters wins. All future renters lose, because the rent-controlled apartments are never re-leased. People sit on them forever.
Price ceiling is the surest way in economics to create a shortage.
If you don't mind investors being unwilling to do new construction. It's a band-aid on a much bigger problem.
That depends on the market. I’m not familiar with St Paul Minnesota, but here in Perth, Western Australia this is raised as an argument every time someone proposes anything to do with rolling back investor tax breaks. That and “there will be no rentals!”
The truth of the situation here is that there is more than enough demand for new housing anyway, much of it gets directly financed by wannabe homeowners, that ‘investment’ goes 90% into existing stock, not new builds, and that investment properties actually create rental demand as investors crowd out would-be owner-occupiers from both existing houses and new-builds opportunities.
In Melbourne, where measures to reduce the attractiveness of investment have already happened, the price of housing has levelled off comparative to other capitals in Aus, and rental availability has actually gone up.
The underlying problem is of course supply, but there appears to be a limit to how fast the building industry can actually build more stock, so with huge demand and limited supply, we don’t need to encourage as much speculation or landlordism in the market.
"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.
> 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.
Counterintuitively, collecting rent is not considered "rent-seeking" by the econ definition, eg: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rentseeking.asp
I'm not picking up any subjective, simplistic labeling like "good" or "bad." Are we reading the same paper?
Haven't fully read the paper, just the introduction and skimmed through the rest, but it seems they're merely observing that a rent control law went into effect, and given some control variables, it seems like it depressed property values.
Their findings also suggest that while the wealth transfer of rent control factor is real -- that is, landlords are impacted more and existing renters see relative benefit -- that effect is greater among higher-income renters and less among lower income renters.
Second paragraph in the Conclusion:
"While the negative wealth effects for owners are large, our results show the positive effects of the law are poorly targeted. Though the intention is to benefit lower income renters, we find that the largest benefits are received in the neighborhoods of the city in which renters have higher incomes, are less likely to be minorities, and have more education. To the extent that price drops for rental properties reflect future rent savings, and thus housing wealth gains for tenants, our results suggest that the largest cost savings are going to be realized in the neighborhoods with the richest, most educated, and least diverse owners."
It's worrying because it reduces the incentive to build more housing.
Generally reduced construction results in higher real estate prices not lower prices. Proof: look at the well studied example of California.
You can also accomplish lower prices by building more. People dont want that so one could argue it is good to make them pay for what they want.
How do you quantify "incentive"? Is a landlord really looking at 5% lower property value and deciding it's not worth investing? Is this even true in aggregate?
It is a major paradigm in economics that if you change this by X% it will change something else by Y% and to estimate that ratio. It may be that people don’t really think that way: economic growth seems to be continuous and exponential in character whereas economic dislocations are discontinuous in character.
I think of how I was absolutely shocked when a Big Mac meal was $10 during the pandemic (I think it cost about $2.50 the first time I bought it) and didn’t think I was going to buy 4% less of it but rather I skipped the fries.
Well, there's 2 ways to become a landlord: to buy a house or to build a house. I was focused only on the second way.
The cost of the wood and the labor needed to build the house is unaffected by the rent control, so if cost remains the same, but the reward (or "revenue") from building the house decrease from $100K to $95K, then fewer houses will get built.
Yeah, sure, but only like, 10-100 fewer housing units per 100k people.
IFF there isn’t already excess demand for building in the market, and house-building is itself ‘liquid’, something that’s not necessarily true.
When supply is constrained by the availability of builders and materials, then some landlords dropping out won’t make a lot of difference there.
Yes. Since the source paper was written, St. Paul has realized that this is the case and rolled back rent control on new construction to hopefully solve the problem. (https://minnesotareformer.com/2025/05/08/st-paul-walks-back-...)
So they're losing out on a few dozen new units, but it is made up for by renters across the board having to pay less rent and thus having more money to put into the economy? Seems like a good trade to me?
Where in the paper do the authors try to argue that this is bad?
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.
This makes me wonder if these cities are a good study subject in the first place.
Is this a metro area with serious rental price pressure where rent stabilization is greatly altering the market conditions, or is housing so available to begin with that it’s more of a feel-good legislation that doesn’t shift prices around?
It looks like from a quick search that over half of people in this metro area own their own home.
I imagine that rent control in many Midwestern metros is effectively pointless. The rent is already being controlled by flat or declining populations, cheap land, and high homeownership rates.
I mean, it's no SF, but Minneapolis definitely has an affordability problem. Every major city does.