Rent control isn’t solving California’s housing problems

In San Jose, multiple proposals to tighten rent controls, perhaps by tying them to inflation, are being debated in the City Council, and some could go to the ballot.

Rent control is a policy that, as libraries full of research and California’s own experience demonstrate, doesn’t do much to accomplish its avowed purpose: to make more affordable housing available.

The reasons for the lack of building are many and related: community resistance, environmental policies, a lack of fiscal incentives for local governments to approve housing, and the high costs of land and construction.

If rent control really lowers prices and produces stability for tenants, as its supporters claim, why are cities with rent control — among them Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, Palm Springs, San Francisco, Santa Monica, San Jose, Thousand Oaks and West Hollywood — so expensive?

[...] when home prices and rents soared after the amendment passed, liberal cities began to install rent-control ordinances that, like Prop. 13, didn’t lower rents or housing prices either.

[...] just as Prop. 13 keeps taxes lower the longer you stay in your home, rent control grants special privileges to the older and more stable among us, regardless of their actual financial need.

The best approach is not more housing incentives — decades of housing incentives both to developers and renters have produced very little housing in the state — but developing robust support structures (via transportation, health, child care, jobs and cash) that follow poor people wherever they can find opportunity.

In a state devoted to antitax formulas that don’t keep taxes low, and education funding guarantees that don’t guarantee enough money for education, it’s no surprise that rent-control laws don’t make housing affordable.