Rent control doesn't make existing apartments get beamed up onto the Starship Enterprise, and supply of housing isn't primarily constrained by it. It's constrai

Rent control doesn't make existing apartments get beamed up onto the Starship Enterprise, and supply of housing isn't primarily constrained by it. It's constrained by a lot of other things, and maybe when those other barriers are removed, and a bunch of houses get built, it might start being constrained by this one. But that's not where we are today. I imply that the market is imbalanced because someone not having a place to live for a month is homeless, while a landlord not having a tenant for a month is a multi-millionaire who is out a few thousand bucks. This wouldn't matter in markets with reasonable vacancy rates, but in markets with unhealthily-low vacancy rates, tenants have to eat whatever shit that trickles down to them, because they can't go somewhere else. This should all be obvious to anyone who rents. > Sure, but price controls don't solve this. Not directly, no, but cost of switching (for both tenant and landlord) is a reason for why rental markets are quite weird, compared to commodity ones.