No, I meant what I wrote. "belief that rent control policies inflict more costs than benefits in the market for housing is notorious as one of the few conclusi

No, I meant what I wrote. "belief that rent control policies inflict more costs than benefits in the market for housing is notorious as one of the few conclusions of economics held across the ideological spectrum" Define your terms. What does "inflict more costs than benefits" mean? What specific policies are we debating? Stop arguing a straw man ("rent control") by referring to the authority of "economists agree", and you'll realize that there is an easy, clear argument for the other side here: social stability. The only thing that "economists agree" upon, is that price caps lead to shortages in efficient markets. That's it. They vehemently disagree when you start asking about policies that don't cap prices, but instead, aim to control the rate of increase in prices in order to reward long-term occupancy. Moreover, there are huge differences in circumstance that must be considered in order to have a productive debate: in a place like Houston, where land is cheap, the arguments for rent control are far weaker than in San Francisco, where Global Wealth has suddenly, spastically decided that this tiny, 47-square-mile city is where All the Monies belong, as of ~2010. (Great for Global Wealth, but bad for the people who lived here before the rich gained a new investment fetish!) I'll make this easy for you: your argument is that "rent control" is bad because economists say it's bad, and #{STANDARD_FREE_MARKET_ARGUMENT_GOES_HERE}. Fine. Mine is that the real world is more complicated than economic theory, and that while "the free market" may be better at allocating wealth efficiently (that is, indeed, all the free market does), there's a higher value: the moral right of occupancy is worth some economic inefficiency. We should provide incentives for long-term tenancy, because such tenancy produces social stability that is better for all of us in the long run. I don't automatically value the free market because someone told me that it's good in econ 101 -- in this case, I hold another value paramount.