Well, that really depends on what you consider a price: if a law prevents a landlord from renting to the tenant offering them the most money, they have to decid

Well, that really depends on what you consider a price: if a law prevents a landlord from renting to the tenant offering them the most money, they have to decide on the basis of some other criterion. In SF, you apparently had people showing up to open houses offering to pay the (legally stipulated) rent a year in advance. (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n03/rebecca-solnit/diary http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n03/rebecca-solnit/diary NB: the author is apparently sympathetic to rent control) Moving a year's worth of future rent up to the present costs money in the form of interest rates, and is a cost. Landlords in rent-controlled units are notorious for dragging their feet on repairs, since the tenant is unlikely to look elsewhere and even if so, another occupant will always be ready to take over the lease. Just searching for a place in a rent-controlled district takes more time. All of these are costs, arising from the fundamental fact that if you make it illegal to allocate a resource on the basis of price, you still have to allocate it some other way. You shouldn't be worried about rent control failing to function as a price ceiling-- you should be worried about it functioning exactly as a price ceiling.