In: Economics
26. Rent controls have five important effects on the market for apartments. Please list and provide an example of each effect.
Ans. Clearly, rent control lends a degree of affordability to those tenants who have remained in rent-controlled apartments for a long time. This is true whether or not the recipient needs this benefit. A senior who is on a fixed income may need and benefit from rent control. A wealthy business owner who may own property outside the city does not need, but does benefit from, rent control. Additionally, in many cities, such as San Francisco, rent control only applies to building of certain types, locations or date of construction. Because rent control applies to buildings and not people, the benefits accrue unevenly across the tenant population.
In many countries these controls result in a decrease in the supply of housing units. The thinking behind the conclusion as it applies to new construction is that investors do not want to risk capital investment in an area in which profits are constrained. On the other hand, controls that do not apply to new construction, such as San Francisco's, would not deter builders of new units. In California, a state law called the Ellis Act allows landlords to go out of the rental business, either permanently or up to at least five years, one of the few escapes from rent control available to landlords of rent-controlled buildings. Some have used this law to turn apartments into TICs (tenants in common units), a local version of ownership that occurs as a precursor to condominium mapping. Others, according to one San Francisco newspaper article, use the law to vacate their buildings for a period of five years and then put the building back into the market with market-rate rents.
A 1985 Federal Reserve Bank study on the relationship between housing quality and maintenance and rent control concludes that rent-controlled housing is associated with housing maintained at a lower quality than it would have been had the units not been subject to rent control. On the other hand, a 2009 broad study on the effects of rent control in Los Angeles concluded that most rent-controlled units were maintained as well as non-rent-controlled units. Results may be different because code enforcement efforts in some communities are stronger than in others and rent control provisions are more restrictive in some communities than others, as concluded in a 2003 study.