Rent control: Another smokescreen to raise taxes?

Experienced consultant Timothy L. Coyle breaks down how rent control further worsens California’s housing crisis. Though advocates intend and claim the opposite, rent control—dominating local cities’ ordinances, such as SJ—leads to housing scarcity and unaffordability for local residents. Proposition 21 may have been rejected in 2020, but the battle is far from over, says Coyle. To receive daily updates of new Opp Now stories, click here.

It’s particularly shameful that strong backing for Proposition 21 – this year’s rent control initiative – came from those in the state legislature who have been wringing their hands lately about California’s affordable housing crisis – a crisis of inadequate supply, not runaway rents.  They should know better.  Regrettably, they don’t.

They fail to recognize that rent control is a form of taxation.  And, they fail to accept a basic tenet of economics:  the more you tax a product the less of that product you get – not a good policy to get more housing built.

They also fail to regard the many other housing-hostile impacts of government’s deliberate intrusion into private housing markets through rent control.  For example, do they know that rent control leads to substandard housing?  

This article originally appeared in Fox & Hounds Daily. Read the whole thing here.