Rent Control: Regulation and the Rental Housing Market

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Housing provides a sense of security, defines our financial and emotional well-being, and influences our self-definition. Not surprisingly, attempts to regulate its price arouse intense controversy. Residential rent control is lauded a s a guarantor of affordable housing, excoriated as an indefensible distortion of the market, and both praised and feared as an attempt to transform the very meaning of housing access and ownership. Traversing this political and conceptual minefield, the book provides a thorough and dispassionate assessment of the nature and evolution of rent regulation in North American cities. Contributors sketch rent control's origins, legal status, economic impacts, political dynamics, and social meaning. Case studies of rent regulation in specific North American cities from New York and Washington, D.C., to Berkeley and Toronto are presented. This important primer for students, advocates, and practitioners of housing policy provides essential insight on the intersection of government and markets.