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Voters love rent freezes. Economists hate them. Except for this one.

Does rent control really backfire?

As America’s housing crisis deepens, policymakers are increasingly turning to an old idea for improving affordability: making large rent increases illegal.

In recent years. Oregon, Washington, and California have enacted statewide rent controls. In 2024, the Biden administration floated a nationwide cap on rent increases for large buildings. And last month, New York’s Rent Guidelines Board approved a two-year rent freeze on the city’s roughly 1 million stabilized units, fulfilling one of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s signature campaign promises.

• Rent control measures tend to be enacted in cities where housing construction is already constrained by other factors.

• It’s not clear that rent regulations discourage homebuilding, when new construction is exempted.

• If poorly designed, rent control can negatively impact the quality and supply of rental housing.

While rent control has long had some appeal to voters, it has historically provoked consternation among economists. In one 2012 survey, just 2 percent of economists agreed with the statement that local rent regulations “had a positive impact over the past three decades on the amount and quality of broadly affordable rental housing.”

The reasoning behind such skepticism is simple: When you make it less profitable to provide rental housing, people produce less of it. As a result, rent control reduces the supply of housing — and thus tends to make cities less affordable in the long run.

But this orthodoxy may soon be overturned – or so argues J.W. Mason, chair of the economics department at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a senior fellow at Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive think tank.

In Mason’s view, the evidence that rent regulations discourage construction has been widely overstated: When designed well — and paired with zoning reforms — rent controls can protect tenants from displacement without reducing the long-term supply of housing.

We spoke this week about the case for (and against) rent control in general and New York City’s policies in particular. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and concision.

Among mainstream economists, conventional wisdom holds that rent control measures are misguided, partly on the grounds that they reduce the long-term supply of housing. In your view, what does that analysis get wrong?

When we talk about rent regulation, we’re typically talking about markets where there are already very substantial constraints on housing supply. Nobody is trying to pass rent regulation in exurban Texas or the Atlanta suburbs, where you have a lot of new housing construction.

Where it’s relatively easy to build housing, rents are going to be closely tied to the cost of building and operating new housing because, if you charge a lot more than that, then you create an opportunity for competitors.

The markets where you have rent regulation are markets like New York City, San Francisco, and a lot of European cities — places where there’s already really hard constraints on the capacity to build new housing. And in cases like that, where supply is already constrained by land use rules or just by an absolute scarcity of buildable land or by other factors, you’re not going to get any additional limitation on supply from rent regulation.

In that context, owners of existing housing collect rents in........

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