In addition to
rent control, policy options enacted or under consideration include resident bills of rights, housing for veterans and other special populations, workforce housing and property tax relief.
The landlords' (and their managers') surliness would reduce the development's profits absent
rent controls, but with
rent controls the effect can be limited to causing tenants to go elsewhere (say, into up-market units with more features that the renters don't consider worth the higher rents) but be replaced by other renters in the tight housing market.
But Douglas Haig, the Residential Landlords Association's director for Wales said: "
Rent controls would be bad news, not just for landlords, but for tenants.
Passionate arguments abound supporting and opposing
rent control. Proponents of
rent control will point to its economic benefits for tenants and property managers.
MAYBE Dan Cookson head of research, Lettingweb for PRS 4 Scotland Where forms of
rent control exist, such as in Berlin, they have been balanced by strong tax incentives and land releases designed to promote supply and encourage investment in the sector.
"From the Gold Coastin Hoboken, Port Imperial, and Jersey City, to market-rate projects in Newark, New Brunswick, Long Branch, Trenton, and Camden, scores of buildings that are now home to thousands of New Jersey's working families would not have been possible without this commitment from the state to safeguard new construction from the well-known ills of local
rent control," said the NJAA.
More surprisingly, the authors also find a "large and significant" spillover impact from the removal of
rent controls onto the valuation of never-controlled properties.
Walter Block, an economist and the author of
Rent Control: Myths and Realities, remarks that "
rent control is a great idea, if what you want to do is promote the production of everything else except rental housing." And his message to investors is simple: "Avoid like the plague any place that is considering
rent control."
The book begins with an overview of the evolution of
rent controls in North America.
1, 1997, Boston, Cambridge, and Brookline, Mass., became the first major American cities to abandon
rent controls since 1950.
In 1992 and 1993 Cambridge landlords, rather than seeking abandonment of the city's
rent controls in the political arena, challenged the plan in court and lost.
Faced with a housing crunch, nine states, along with such major cities as Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., have instituted
rent controls. As a result, 12 percent of the nation's housing is now covered by some form of control.
