Rent Control

See: Rent Regulation.

Rent control. Depending on who you are, it could be your best friend or your worst enemy.

If you’re a landlord, rent control...sucks. The free-ish market of supply and demand of housing in the area is what has made your housing so high-priced. With rent control, the government has put a price ceiling on how much you can charge tenants to live there. It cuts into your profits or makes you unprofitable; in an economic downdraft, you lose money. Worst case scenario? You’re actually losing money from rent control if the maintenance, mortgage, and property taxes are more than the rent you’re collecting...and you go bankrupt.

If you’re a tenant, rent control could be your saving grace. Rent control is pretty uncommon, so you’ll only really find it in extreme housing scenarios...mostly in happening spots in big cities (think: SF, NYC). If you’re working a job in the city and don’t want to commute for an hour-plus, rent controlled housing can cut you a break. You’re working on a budget here, after all.

Rent control is put in place when the service people who are there at the behest of the wealthy (think: waiters, ski patrol at posh resorts, street sweepers, garbage collectors) can't afford to live anywhere nearby. What happens? Well, they move. Then there exist severe labor shortages. And the wealthy paying those high real estate prices have no garbage collected. And that's kinda the "end of the city," or at least of its innocence, as Don Henley sings.

Hot button political issue though. If you were a free market capitalist, you'd just tell restaurants to go ahead and start charging $28 for that burger with a note on the menu, "Hey. We gotta pay our waiters."