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With rent control in the news, it’s a good moment to recall the research of @rebeccadiamond.bsky.social and co-authors. They show that strict rent control in San Francisco reduced the availability of rental housing, eventually *raising* rental costs. doi.org/10.1257/aer....

That means they can watch what happens to rental supply and price in buildings on the same block, otherwise indistinguishable from each other, but for the fact that some were built slightly earlier and got rent control — almost at random.

In other words, this is not “textbook economics”. Textbook models are great starting points. But what counts as much as careful thinking is careful observation of the world. Rent control might seem promising on paper but it has a bad track record in practice. Makes things worse.

This is why, when the @kentclarkcenter.bsky.social asks a panel of dozens of the worlds’s best economists about rent control, they mostly warn against it. They know the evidence, not just the textbooks. kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/rent...