The data shows that rent control regulations can slightly decrease the number of rental units. If that's all there was, then rental control is clearly bad. How

The data shows that rent control regulations can slightly decrease the number of rental units. If that's all there was, then rental control is clearly bad. However, rent control is fundamentally about providing stability and security for existing tenants. I've yet to see any study try to account for that, perhaps because it's very difficult to quantify. But without accounting for this benefit then empirical studies can only ever show the downsides. There exist the same stability and security concerns with property taxes. Oddly, few economists seem to seriously promote Georgist land value taxes, notwithstanding lay enthusiasm. Probably because they intuitively understand that it's politically untenable, regardless of how economically efficient it is, to tax people out of their homes just because the world around them has changed. And indeed, if you look at every example in the United States where LVTs have been attempted, you see that LVT rules and their administration invariably succumbed, often almost immediately, to myriad exceptions and loopholes in the face of political pressure, especially from residential property owners. Is it impossible to avoid rental controls in large, high-demand cities, or impossible to institute rigorous LVTs? I don't think so. But it's much more difficult in some political-economic contexts than in others. Many things need to align to make it tenable, not the least of which is the capacity to deal with the disruption for existing residents and ensuring that the security and stability needs for future such residents can be met in other ways. Don't forget that for an economist you can solve problems by, for example, packing housing insecure people into box cars and shipping them off to the desert where you've built beautiful bungalows for them to live out the rest of their lives, so long as the cost of those bungalows is less than the efficiencies unleashed by opening up the market for people of more means. Or maybe less cynically, give them monthly stipends that they could (and hopefully would) use to relocate. But suffice it to say, such solutions are often, to varying extents, contrary to normative economics--i.e. what we're fundamentally trying to achieve or are capable of achieving socially. To my mind, the question of whether rental control is bad or good seems misplaced and impossible to answer without more context. And rent control policies can always be tailored to the local situation. Loosely speaking, pretty much the entirety of the U.S. is already subject to some kind of rental control in the sense that there are almost always laws, for example, that provide tenants the benefit of long notice periods before eviction, or which nullify directly or indirectly damages for early lease termination. These impose real costs that get baked into rents, but the benefits to tenants are generally considered worthwhile.