1. Rent Control Provides Relief That Is Fast

The long-term answer to our US crisis is for us to move away from the commodification of housing and instead embrace housing as a human right guaranteed to all. As we will see in chapter 8, that means far more public housing and other forms of social housing, along with much better maintenance of the public housing we already have. We will see in chapter 9 that these are solutions proven to be effective in other nations and in our own past US practices. We just discussed in chapter 6 one necessary step on that path: universal vouchers, guaranteeing housing assistance for all who are eligible, the same way the US already does with food, medical assistance, and public schooling.¹⁷ All these non-market policy reforms are imperative in a nation where millions of Americans—including a lot of the single parents and persons living with disabilities whom we see in court—simply cannot afford market-rate rent.¹⁸

But these non-market fixes will take time to implement, and Ashley and the tenants we see in eviction court each week need immediate relief. The remedies others support with more enthusiasm than I do, such as a big increase in housing construction, which would in theory lead to lower costs overall, will not be immediate, either.¹⁹ (More on this “filtering” theory, where more housing supply would lead to lower costs, in chapter 8.) In the current reality, the only housing option for Ashley and most renters is to find a home in the private, for-profit rental market. That means the response that best addresses their monthly struggle right now is limiting the cost of for-profit rent.

Part of the reason rent control can move so fast is that it carries little cost to taxpayers. Rent control administration is performed by government agencies, some of whom fund themselves with small fees charged to landlords. The modest cost governments incur to administer rent control is more than offset by avoiding the high government expenses associated with housing insecurity, such as homeless services, eviction proceedings, and health care interventions.²⁰

2. Rent Control Provides Relief That Is Vast

The most comprehensive, well-structured report on rent control I have seen was written by researchers Amee Chew and Sarah Treuhaft and published by Policy Link, the Center for Popular Democracy, and the Right to the City Alliance. Chew and Treuhaft summarize the case for rent control perfectly: “Rent control is the most immediate solution to address the affordability crisis—its speed and scale, cost-effectiveness, and ability to protect a huge swath of low-income and marginalized renters are unrivaled.”²¹

The breadth of rent control’s impact is demonstrably true. In cities with active rent control, the number of households with stabilized rents far exceeds households living in public and subsidized housing.²² So when landlord lobbyists attempt to water down rent control’s impact, it is important to resist. Often these lobbyists argue for exempting from controls some rental property, like single-family homes or mobile homes. But those exemptions disproportionately harm struggling rural renters.²³ So-called vacancy decontrol, a loophole that allows landlords to spike rents between tenants, is problematic too, since it creates a strong incentive for unjustified evictions.²⁴

Most importantly, we should not limit rent control because rent control works, and works well. Landlord lobbyists have been able to sow popular confusion about the impact rent control has on new housing construction and whether the poorest renters benefit the most, issues we will address in arguments 6 and 9 below. But even the landlord lobbyists can’t quarrel with the data showing that rent control effectively addresses the pressing crisis experienced by Ashley and millions of others: simply put, rent control lowers the cost of housing compared to unregulated housing.²⁵

The price of for-profit housing, even when controlled, is still too high for the many renters we see in eviction court who have severely limited incomes because of disability and family obligations. For them, non-market housing is a necessity. But, as these same clients tell us all the time, every dollar reduced from their rent puts them a dollar closer to the safety and security they need and deserve.

Speaking of security, the evidence is extremely solid that rent control leads to tenants staying in their homes for a longer time. That is a benefit so important that it deserves two of its own arguments:

3. Built to Last, Part 1: Rent Control Brings Stability to Households

For families who have been battered and displaced by big annual rent hikes, rent control allows them to take a deep breath, put down roots, and reap the benefits of a stable living arrangement. The evidence on this point is conclusive: under rent control, tenants stay in their homes significantly longer, even in neighborhoods that are being gentrified.²⁶ Rent control disproportionately benefits those who need it most, especially Black-led households, households with children, and elderly renters—the households most likely to be displaced when costs are not controlled.²⁷

As we saw in chapter 4, US tax policy provides to homeowners generous tax benefits that renters do not enjoy, part of the reason why homeownership is so often portrayed as the essence of the American dream. Even beyond tax benefits, renters’ desire for homeownership is fully rational, because homeownership promises stability that renting in an unregulated environment cannot match. In our work, we routinely see families being displaced because their landlords increased their rent by huge amounts, refused to renew leases because of a desire to remodel and charge higher costs, or sold the home out from under their tenants. Along with good-cause requirements for evictions and other renter protections discussed in chapter 5, rent control would provide renters with the stability that homeowners already enjoy.

Research has shown that housing stability is linked to longer tenures at jobs and improved educational outcomes for children.²⁸ Other studies show that a student loses three to six months of education with each family move.²⁹ Housing stability has a particularly positive impact on health. Research conclusively confirms what common sense already tells us: frequent moves and housing instability harm children’s and adults’ physical and mental well-being, leading to increased hospitalizations, worse mental health, reduced ability to escape domestic violence situations, decreased access to medications and healthy food, and spikes in depression and anxiety.³⁰

We can do better. As Rutgers University economist Mark Paul has pointed out, we already do—for wealthier homeowners. The long-term fixed-rate mortgage was created by the US government to provide housing cost control. “Homeowners, who skew white and rich, benefit tremendously from the government’s rules, regulations, and subsidies that allow them to pay a fixed monthly sum for housing over 30 years,” Paul says. “It’s high time for the government to extend these benefits—and the economic security that comes with them—by adopting rent control to cover all people in the United States.”³¹

4. Built to Last, Part 2: Rent Control Brings Stability to Communities

The value of rent control extends beyond the walls of the homes of those whose costs are regulated. Renters who stay in their homes for longer periods are more likely to be civically engaged, an outcome that has powerful anticrime effects.³² Children staying in the same school longer reduces the need for additional educational intervention.³³ Economically, renters with controlled rent costs can afford to spend more money in their community, boosting local businesses in a way that remotely located real estate speculators of those same houses do not.³⁴

Without rent control, much-needed service-sector and caregiving workers are forced by high rents in cities to live far from urban centers, often compelling them to rely on cars instead of mass transit for their commutes.³⁵ Under rent control, these workers can live in neighborhoods close to those jobs. When they do not face difficult commutes and work near their children’s schools and care centers, these workers’ carbon footprint is reduced while their capacity to be productive and reliable employees goes way up.

5. Rent Control Has a Long, Successful History

In addition to being a common practice in other nations that have avoided housing crises as acute as that in the US, rent control has a long and successful history in our country.³⁶ Fair rent committees were established in over 150 cities during World War I, and were followed by rent control systems that covered 80 percent of all rental housing during World War II.³⁷ Tenant advocacy during the second half of the twentieth century led to rent control being applied in nearly two hundred cities.³⁸

US courts, including the US Supreme Court in a 1988 decision written by the conservative chief justice William Rehnquist, have repeatedly confirmed that rent control is fully legal.³⁹ As the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in 2023 affirming the dismissal of landlords’ lawsuit challenging New York’s rent stabilization law, “Among other reasons, the [New York law] was enacted to permit low- and moderate-income people to reside in New York City—when they otherwise could not afford to do so. It is beyond dispute that neighborhood continuity and stability are valid bases for enacting a law.”⁴⁰

As our courts keep repeating, our government represents the people. That means the government has a strong legal interest in preventing private companies—who benefit heavily from government programs like infrastructure, research and development, and public safety—from price gouging us on the cost of a good that is necessary for our survival.⁴¹ When those companies exploit people who must have access to that essential good, those companies can undercut the entire economic system and all our antipoverty efforts.

For example, increases in wages and benefits like the Earned Income Tax Credit, designed to support working families, can instead be gobbled up by landlords via rent spikes. Since 1985, rent increases have exceeded wage growth by over 300 percent.⁴² And renters like our clients often pay far more per month to landlords than they would if they were buying the homes and paying mortgages.⁴³

Policymakers and voters realize this. We have had multiple forms of US price controls past and present, starting with limits on the price of staples imposed by the colonial governments and the earliest states in the US.⁴⁴ Current price controls include regulations on the amount companies can charge for goods like electricity, water, gas, and prescription drugs.⁴⁵ Sweeping price controls on food and other necessities were imposed during wartime on multiple occasions.⁴⁶ The Richard Nixon administration in the 1970s instituted price controls, including rent control.⁴⁷ And broad price controls are being proposed again today in Congress and by a coalition of economists.⁴⁸

The two-hundred-plus municipalities in the US that impose some kind of rent control include large cities like New York, Los Angeles, St. Paul, Minnesota, and Washington, DC, along with smaller communities like Los Gatos, California, and dozens of small towns and townships in New Jersey.⁴⁹ New rent control laws are being passed every year, especially via voter referendums.⁵⁰ Oregon adopted statewide rent control, joining the District of Columbia. And multiple rent control campaigns are active in other states and at the national level.⁵¹

6. Landlord Lobbyists Claim That Rent Control Depresses Housing Supply; the Evidence Says Otherwise

It comes as no surprise that the National Multifamily Housing Council, whose membership includes large corporate landlords like Blackstone and Starwood Capital Group, fiercely resists rent control. The core of its lobbying and marketing attack is summarized on its website: “Rather than improving the availability of affordable housing, rent control has exacerbated shortages.”⁵² The National Association of Realtors, which led the nation with $84 million spent on lobbying in 2020, has chimed in, claiming rent control deters incentives to build more housing.⁵³

This is a self-interested rehashing of an Economics 101 argument: the lower the price of a good, the less incentive that for-profit providers will have to produce that good. Historically, many economists have subscribed to that very school of thought. The late Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck is often quoted saying that rent control is the most efficient way to destroy a city, “next to bombing.”⁵⁴

It is a dramatic image, and a superficially compelling argument. Many media outlets parrot this landlord lobbyist argument as an established fact.⁵⁵ But it is not true. It turns out there is good reason why Econ 101 is the beginning of the discipline’s study and not its capstone.

As housing writer Jerusalem Desmas noted in a 2021 Vox article explaining why she switched from a rent control critic to supporter, the same raise-price/reduce-supply formula was once the basis for conventional economics wisdom resisting increases in the minimum wage. Then the data came in: actual analysis of minimum wage increases debunked the idea that that they significantly reduced the number of jobs available.⁵⁶ The simplistic critique of raising lower-end salaries failed to consider variables that benefited job growth and maintenance, including how lower-wage workers (like renters) boost their local economies by spending their extra salaries closer to home.⁵⁷ Employees who make higher wages also stay on the job longer, increasing efficiency in the workplace.⁵⁸ With the data now plentiful, increases in the minimum wage enjoy widespread support among economists.⁵⁹

Similarly, criticism of rent control fails to consider the entire picture. As a 2019 report from the Urban Institute said, “Rent control’s poor reputation in the economics literature has tended to rely more on models than on case studies or observed impacts.”⁶⁰ Just as the critique of minimum wage increases dissolved as true empirical results rolled in, the landlord lobby’s sky-is-falling predictions of reduced housing supply are proving to be untrue. As a July 2023 letter from thirty-two economists to the Biden administration arguing for rent control on government-backed rental properties said, “The economics 101 model that predicts rent regulations will have negative effects on the housing sector is being proven wrong by empirical studies that better analyze real world dynamics.”⁶¹

Predictably, landlord lobbyists still cite studies that appear to support their argument that rent control will depress housing supply, including a widely criticized Stanford University analysis written by researchers with ties to the landlord industry.⁶² Some of that quoted analysis is knocking down a straw man of strict rent ceilings with no increases. A report commissioned and distributed by the National Association of Realtors, one of the leading landlord lobbying organizations, admits that many economists who are supposedly anti–rent control are in fact opposing only those rent price ceilings, not the system of controlled increases contemplated by all current rent control proposals.⁶³

So it is not surprising that, when housing researchers from the University of California Berkeley, the University of Minnesota, UCLA, and the University of Southern California have reviewed the evidence, they concluded, as the UC Berkeley report flatly states, the argument that “rent control has negative effects on the development of new housing are generally not supported by the research.”⁶⁴

Studies of rent control in New Jersey, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Boston, and the Bay Area show no significant impact of rent control on construction rates.⁶⁵ The summary, according to City University of New York economics professor J. W. Mason: “Contrary to the predictions of the simple supply-and-demand model, none of these studies have found evidence that introducing or strengthening rent regulations reduces new housing construction, or that eliminating rent regulation increases construction.”

Yet, Mason pointed out, there was one clear impact of rent control. “Most of these studies do, however, find that rent control is effective at holding down rents.”⁶⁶ Which, we need to remember, is the core aim of rent control: responding to the crisis caused by the rent being too damn high.

On the question of housing supply, rent control not only does not have a negative effect, but it could also actually have a very positive impact. Rent control would block landlords and developers from generating huge profits by spiking rent prices—as they have recently, with average rent rising nearly 20 percent during 2021–2023 amid the widespread allegations of price-fixing.⁶⁷ So economists like University of Southern California’s Gary Painter say that rent control will spur rental housing owners to change their approach. “Developers have to go to a Plan B if they want to make more money,” Painter says. “Build more units.”⁶⁸

That result is particularly appealing, given that an enormous contributor to the current US housing supply problem is the overdevelopment of luxury housing and landlords keeping units vacant in search of higher rents.⁶⁹ As Painter says, rent limits would push market forces away from higher-end construction toward the needed affordable housing. A study of the effects of New Jersey’s rent control implementation showed that landlords were indeed motivated post–rent control to create more rental units.⁷⁰

The historical record shows the same. New York City’s most robust periods of building occurred during the 1920s and the mid-twentieth century—when rent control regulations were strictly enforced.⁷¹ After the landlord lobby persuaded Massachusetts voters to repeal rent control in 1994, the lobbyists’ construction-depressing claims were proven to be untrue: multifamily housing construction did not significantly increase.⁷² Rents went way up, though, as did evictions.⁷³ All of which suggests that the landlord lobby’s continued anti–rent control argument is more about protecting their price gouging profits than increasing supply.

7. Landlord Lobbyists’ Claims That Rent Control Harms Housing Conditions Don’t Hold Up

In court, landlords consistently tell us that what they most covet is long-term, reliable renters who take care of the property. Those tenants reduce landlords’ costs significantly, because they allow landlords to avoid the headaches and expense of turnover and avoidable maintenance.

Since rent control is proven to boost tenant stability, it is ironic that landlord lobbyists like the National Apartment Association and the National Association of Realtors claim that rent control will reduce the quality of rental housing.⁷⁴ These lobbyists’ argument is that rent control discourages landlord investment in maintenance and improvements. Putting aside the ethical issues invoked by landlords saying they will refuse to maintain their rental properties if their profits are not unlimited, simple enforcement of existing housing codes should remedy any issues with landlords neglecting to keep up their properties.

As for improvements, landlords of rent-controlled units often find their tenants to be willing partners in home maintenance and remodeling.⁷⁵ These tenants’ longer and more secure tenure motivates them to make their own improvements to the homes they plan to occupy for many years. Our renter clients will often show us photos of the additions and repairs they made on the property they called home for several years. As University of Virginia economist Edgar Olsen concluded after reviewing the data: “There is no basis for economists’ strongly held belief that rent control leads to worse maintenance.”⁷⁶

You know who is aware that rent control can lead to improved conditions? Landlord lobbyists. In a comprehensive 154-page report on rent control prepared in 2017 for the National Association of Realtors, law professor Valerie Werness states the following: “In some cases, rent control may increase long-term tenants’ incentives to renovate individual units. Common sense says that a tenant who knows he or she will be in the premises for a longer term is more likely to be willing to invest sweat equity and their own money into improving a unit… . As a side note, a 1988 study found no basis whatsoever for economists’ assertions that rent control leads to worse maintenance.”⁷⁷

Kudos to Professor Werness for her integrity in writing a report for an organization that vehemently resists rent control. Professor Werness also acknowledges other key evidence in support of rent control:

• Removal of rent control in Massachusetts spiked rents and evictions.
• Rent control effectively limits rent increases and promotes household and neighborhood stability, especially in gentrifying neighborhoods.
• Rent control that allows for limited increases can exceed landlord costs and may not even reduce landlord profits.
• Evidence from New York and New Jersey does not support the landlord lobbyist argument that rent control depresses new construction.

The report is available on the NAR website, at least for the moment. If the reader can’t find it, let me know. I downloaded a copy in the likely event that the landlord lobbyists decide to remove it.

8. Rent Control Moves the Needle toward Housing Being a Human Right, Not Just a Commodity

For me, housing policy priorities are shaped by the grim reality my students and I see each week in eviction courts. As I have described, we see single moms juggling multiple low-wage jobs and sick kids. We see people living with significant disabilities and fixed, very low incomes. For them, the private for-profit housing market will never consistently meet their needs, nor will it meet the needs of millions of others like them. As housing experts like Alex Schwartz and Kirk McClure have written, these people simply cannot afford housing costs that cover private landlords’ own expenses, even with a limited profit.⁷⁸

For these clients of ours, subsidized housing, not rent control, is the long-term answer. The permanent solution will be to stop the outrage we discussed in chapter 4, where our government spends more resources supporting wealthy homeowners and landlords than we spend on housing subsidies for the poor. We can and should provide universal vouchers covering all who are eligible, and we can and should build far more public housing and refurbish the public housing we already have—more on this in chapter 8. In chapter 9, we will talk about how other nations’ governments promise in their constitutions and statutes that housing is a human right, and they fulfill that promise. We will learn that, even here in the US, we did a far better job housing our people before the 1980s. So, it can be done.

But first we need to get there. The “Overton Window,” the idea that there is a spectrum of possible policy approaches that are widely acceptable to the public, is real.⁷⁹ So is the fact that the window can be shifted by adopting interim policies that move toward reforms outside the current mainstream political agenda. By recognizing that it is disastrous and immoral to allow a person or entity to extract every possible penny from someone else’s dire need for shelter, rent control shifts that window of acceptable policy toward acceptance of housing as a human right. Rent control is not a substitute for greatly expanding our housing subsidies, but it is a step in that direction.

9. Rent Control Helps Those Who Need It the Most

In its court brief supporting landlord lobbyists’ recent unsuccessful challenge of New York City’s rent stabilization law, the National Association of Realtors gave voice to a claim about rent control’s impact that is regularly levied by the NAR, the National Multifamily Housing Council, and the National Apartment Association: “Rent control frequently benefits the wealthy while doing little to help the poor.”⁸⁰

If true, this conclusion would certainly be ironic. Who knew that wealthy landlord lobbyists are the parties truly concerned about the poor, while organizations led and supported by low-income tenants foolishly push for rent control? But the claim of outsize benefits for wealthy renters is not true. It has been refuted by a consensus of housing scholars, as evidenced by the formal court response to this NAR brief filed on behalf of multiple housing law and policy professors. These scholars label the NAR claim “simply false.”⁸¹ Amee Chew and Sarah Treuhaft’s 2019 report cites two dozen studies to support the same, unequivocal conclusion: “Rent control disproportionately benefits low-income tenants, seniors, people of color, women-headed households, persons living with disability and chronic illness, families with children, and others who have the least choice in the rental market and are most susceptible to rent gouging, harassment, eviction, and displacement.”⁸²

It is particularly important to note that those studies show that rent control benefits households of color, most of whom are renters.⁸³ After our discussion in chapter 3 about the generations of housing racism in the form of government-supported redlining, demolition of Black neighborhoods, displacement, and predatory lending, we know that our nation has much to make up for.⁸⁴ Rent control is not the full remedy to that injustice, but its disproportionate benefit to households of color puts us on the right path.

10. Rent Control Helping the Non-poor Is a Feature, Not a Bug

We know that the National Association of Realtors’ argument that rent control mostly helps the wealthy grossly overshoots the mark. But there is some truth underneath the histrionics: rent control does provide some benefit to people who are not poor. And that is a good thing.

History shows us that means-tested government programs that are accessible only to the poor are doomed to be perpetual targets of political attacks and middle- and upper-class resentment.⁸⁵ That has led to cutbacks in programs like SNAP (food stamps), Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), and child tax credits.⁸⁶ As the saying goes, programs for the poor are poor programs. Compare the political vulnerability of those programs with universal benefits like Social Security, the so-called “third rail of US politics”—touch it and you die.⁸⁷ Or look at another universal program, Medicare, so popular that health care reform debates in the early 2000s featured seniors paradoxically demanding that “government, keep your hands off my Medicare.”⁸⁸

Similarly, social movement history shows that a core requirement for a successful movement is a broad base of popular support.⁸⁹ That base often includes higher-income people who are more likely to be politically active and influential.⁹⁰ Forty-four million households in the US—more than a third of the population—rent their homes, and some of these renters are middle income and higher.⁹¹ Renters form the majority of people in many of our largest cities, and there are millions of rural renting households as well.⁹² So it should be no surprise that rent control proposals that will benefit people across the income spectrum have been receiving a winning level of popular support.

11. Rent Control Is Winning Support across the Country

As noted in argument 5, rent control has a long and impactful history in the US. That history is still being made, with rent control in place currently in 182 municipalities and the state of Oregon and the District of Columbia.⁹³ Across states and municipalities, there is a flurry of ongoing rent control activity, including vibrant campaigns in California, Florida, and Michigan.⁹⁴

In 2021, St. Paul, Minnesota, voters approved a rent control ordinance.⁹⁵ That same year, Boston mayor Michelle Wu was elected on a platform of rent control, which enjoyed a two-to-one level of support among likely voters in a 2023 Boston poll.⁹⁶ A 2019 Data for Progress poll showed similar national-level majority support for rent control.⁹⁷

In Illinois, the Lift the Ban campaign is pushing to reverse the 1997 statewide ban on rent control.⁹⁸ The adoption of rent control laws that target mobile home parks, such as the successful campaign in Humboldt County, California, suggests there is fertile ground for a powerful coalition. Millions of rural renters can find common cause with residents in urban areas.⁹⁹

One of the most impressive recent victories for rent control occurred in November 2020, when 57 percent of Portland, Maine, voters handed a big victory to a rent control measure. The successful campaign was a dramatic reversal from a nearly two-to-one defeat of a similar proposal three years earlier, a change that organizers credited to organizing by a coalition of housing, environmental, and labor advocates.¹⁰⁰ Momentum seems to be building across the country, with the November 2022 midterm elections featuring rent control victories in multiple cities in Maine, California, and Florida.¹⁰¹ A Bloomberg News headline after the midterm election said it well: “As Housing Costs Spike, Voters Look for Hope in Rent Control.”¹⁰²

At the national level, as we will learn more in chapter 11, tenant unions led a coalition of two-hundred-plus organizations calling on the Biden-Harris administration to impose rent control on all properties financed by government-backed mortgages, a measure that would apply to one of every four rental units in the country.¹⁰³ They are also demanding that the US require all states and cities that seek coveted Community Development Block Grants commit to rent control. Similarly, the national community organizing coalition Center for Popular Democracy calls for rent control at a national level.¹⁰⁴

This tenant union campaign has brought hundreds of tenants to both the White House and Congress, calling for an executive order that would slow skyrocketing rent increases. Tenant, housing, and legal advocacy groups even drafted the order for Biden to sign.¹⁰⁵ In 2024, Biden did order a rent cap on Low-Income Housing Tax Credit housing, a partial victory that showed the potential for federal action controlling rents.¹⁰⁶

Aggressive federal action would reflect the changed renting landscape. Tenants who once dealt with mom-and-pop local landlords are now forced to confront the power of national and even multinational corporations. A 2021 Brookings Institution report showed that nine in ten rental units are owned either by businesses or individuals in wealthier households.¹⁰⁷ “Increasingly the real estate market is run by institutional investors who have consolidated the market,” Tara Raghuveer, director of KC Tenants in Kansas City and the Tenant Union Federation, said in one of our several interviews. “These are multi-state or even multinational actors that can’t be effectively regulated by local or state policy alone.”

These corporate landlords turn to the federal government to prop up their operations, Raghuveer pointed out. “The business model of many of these real estate investors is to get government-backed mortgages through Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, or a tax credit from the Treasury Department or support from HUD or the Department of Agriculture,” she said. “So, we see it as an absolute necessity that the federal government actually use those public subsidies and financing as leverage to increase the power position of the tenant relative to the landlord.” We will dive deeper into this campaign in chapters 11 and 12.

12. Responsible Landlords Don’t Need to Fear Rent Control

Landlord lobbyists have sliced off a chunk of tenants’ rents to fund desperate fights against rent control proposals. Analysis from the California-based advocacy group Housing Is a Human Right tallies up over $175 million spent by landlord lobbyists in that state alone fighting against rent control proposals.¹⁰⁸ Those lobbyists have also filed expensive court actions trying to stop rent control laws, citing the perpetually rejected argument that government rent regulation amounts to an uncompensated taking that violates the Fifth Amendment.¹⁰⁹ Landlord lobbyists prop up the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) model legislation designed to block cities from passing rent control laws, and the industry spent over $100 million in federal lobbying alone in 2020 and 2021.¹¹⁰

This landlord money has had an impact. In California, statewide ballot proposals to expand rent control have been defeated, in large part due to expensive and misleading ad campaigns by landlord lobbyists.¹¹¹ The ALEC-drafted legislation that preempts cities from passing rent control has passed in thirty-seven states.¹¹² In the 1990s, landlord lobbyists funded successful efforts to repeal rent control in Massachusetts and weaken it in New York City.¹¹³ After St. Paul voters in 2021 voted to limit rent increases, the city council caved into landlord and developer pressure to override the people’s votes and water down its rent control law.¹¹⁴

But does all this spending benefit the landlords whose business models are grounded in renting good-condition properties at a price that ensures a solid return? After all, rent control guarantees those landlords predictable, profitable revenue, pursuant to the US Supreme Court’s requirement that regulation of rents guarantee landlords a “fair return.”¹¹⁵ All of the current rent control proposals are designed to allow for regular increases, and a study analyzing two decades of New York City rent control showed that the allowed rent increases outpaced landlord costs.¹¹⁶

Yet, for one growing sector of the landlord industry, a “fair return” is not enough. The anti–rent control lobbying is funded predominately by corporate landlords who are in the business of housing speculation, destabilizing neighborhoods and spiking rents with the help of the shared algorithm pricing program that has led to antitrust allegations.¹¹⁷ We know that these mega-landlords are more likely than local, smaller landlords to poorly maintain properties and evict their tenants. And we know from chapter 4 that they transform their top executives into multibillionaires who are notorious for avoiding paying taxes.¹¹⁸

For those types of toxic landlords, rent control is likely to clip their wings. But smaller, local, responsible landlords will enjoy under rent control stability of renters and a guaranteed return on their investments. These landlords should give rent control a closer look. Ashley and the rest of us should insist our lawmakers do the same.