Whenever billionaire corporate landlords and YIMBYs counter pro-rent control advocates, they routinely use a false argument: rent control alone won’t solve the housing affordability crisis. It’s a false argument because housing activists have never made that case – they know a multi-pronged approach is needed. It’s why Housing Is A Human Right and other advocates push for the “3 Ps.”
The 3 Ps is simple and effective: protect renters with tenant protections such as rent control; preserve existing affordable housing, not demolish it to make way for unaffordable luxury housing; and produce new affordable and homeless housing, using such concepts as adaptive reuse and pre-fabricated housing.
Activists, with decades of experience on the frontlines, have long said that we can’t simply build our way out of the housing affordability crisis. That’s why they push for the 3 Ps.
Interestingly, billionaire corporate landlords and YIMBYs actually promote their own single-minded, silver-bullet approach. They only talk about building more housing, also known as a “trickle-down housing” solution. They say that we just need to build, build, build and rents will automatically come down.
It’s a self-serving, over-simplified approach that hasn’t worked for a multitude of reasons, and it doesn’t urgently address the dire situation that poor and middle- and working-class tenants are facing right now with sky-high rents eating up, in many cases, 40 to 50 percent of their incomes. It’s especially serious since unaffordable rents are linked to higher mortality rates and increased risks of homelessness.
That’s where rent regulations – rent control or rent stabilization – come in. Rent regulations directly address the affordability issues that tenants are drowning under. Rent control creates stable, affordable housing for them. At the same time, elected officials can work on ways to preserve existing affordable housing and produce new affordable and homeless housing.
Not long ago, Brian Callaci and Sandeep Vaheesan, of the Open Markets Institute, published an excellent white paper in the Harvard Business Review on ways to solve the housing affordability crisis. They advocated for a multi-pronged approach, which included rent regulations.
Callaci and Vaheesan wrote: “Recent research shows that the market itself needs to be fixed. Any plan to overhaul the housing market needs to, first, confront the power of landlords to raise rents. Second, it requires rethinking public governance of housing markets behind simplistic prescriptions to just free the housing market from government regulation, assuming lower rents will follow. And third, it needs to provide more muscular government involvement in housing, through price regulation, more robust planning, and even direct public provision.” (Italics are mine.)
For a report called Rent Matters: What are the Impacts of Rent Stabilization Measures?, University of Southern California professor Manuel Pastor and his colleagues acknowledged the need for urgent action as well as a multi-pronged approach. They wrote: “Rent Matters shows that rent stabilization is one tool in addressing the housing crisis with far fewer negative impacts than is generally thought. It will not address everything, but it will also not impede the housing market. It is a useful tool in a crisis.”
Pastor underlined the need for urgent solutions such as rent stabilization when he told the Los Angeles Times, “When the fire is creeping up the hillside toward people’s houses, you don’t say, ‘Hey, let’s sit down and have a seminar about the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and avoid this problem in the future.’”
Billionaire corporate landlords like to say that economists don’t support rent control, but, in 2023, a group of 32 top economists from across the United States wrote a letter to the Biden administration saying that they fully support rent regulations.
“Through well-crafted policies,” they wrote, “rent regulations can be designed in a manner that protects the general health and well-being of renters, promotes affordability, mitigates future inflationary episodes, and maintains landlords’ ability to receive a fair and reasonable return on investment.”
They also said that the real estate industry’s anti-rent control arguments are outdated and wrong.
Unlike Big Real Estate, housing justice activists want politicians to use a multi-pronged approach. They don’t believe rent control is the only answer. They know, from decades of experience, that the best way to address the housing affordability crisis is to protect tenants, preserve existing affordable housing, and produce new affordable and homeless housing.
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