[ “While other proposed remedies to the housing crisis may take
years before they impact housing costs, only expanding rent control
can offer immediate relief to millions of people in danger of being
forced from their homes.” ]
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ACADEMIC HEAVYWEIGHTS TO NAYSAYERS: RENT CONTROL WORKS  
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Patrick Range McDonald
September 14, 2022
Housing is a Human Right
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_ “While other proposed remedies to the housing crisis may take
years before they impact housing costs, only expanding rent control
can offer immediate relief to millions of people in danger of being
forced from their homes.” _

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It wasn’t long ago that researchers at the University of Southern
California, UC Berkeley, and UCLA released key studies that found rent
control is an effective tool to keep people housed and to stabilize a
housing affordability crisis. Big Real Estate and other rent control
opponents have tried to ignore the findings of these academic
heavyweights, but the reports were clear: rent control works.
With local rent control movements popping up all over the country
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it’s a good time to again showcase these studies.

In 2018, USC released a study called “Rent Matters: What Are the
Impacts of Rent Stabilization Measures?”
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Manuel Pastor, a highly regarded professor at USC, and commissioned by
the California Community Foundation [[link removed]]. The
study continues to be relevant and important – St. Paul housing
justice activists cited it during their successful campaign to pass a
pro-rent control ballot measure in 2021
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The key takeaways from “Rent Matters” directly push back against
old arguments made by the real estate industry and other opponents of
rent control. First, Pastor and co-authors Vanessa Carter and Maya
Abood found that rent regulations “do not necessarily increase the
rent of non-regulated units and may actually keep rent more affordable
for all.” Second, rent regulations have “minimal impact on new
construction.” Third, “rent stabilization increases housing
stability, which has important health and educational attainment
benefits.” Fourth, “there is no conclusive evidence about the
impacts on ‘mom and pop’ landlords.” Fifth, “rent regulations
may deter gentrification.”

These are huge findings. Unlike the outdated claims made by anti-rent
control forces, Pastor and his colleagues show that rent control or
rent stabilization will help the people who need it most: poor and
working-class residents, communities of color, and middle-class
residents, all of whom are getting slammed the hardest by
gentrification and the housing affordability crisis
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In addition, a study by Zillow, the real estate website, found that in
cities where people spend more than 32 percent of their take-home pay
on rent, a spike in homelessness will follow. Rent regulations will
address that, preventing people from falling into homelessness
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Researchers Nicole Montojo and Stephen Barton, who released a study
through UC Berkeley, also found that “while other proposed remedies
to the housing crisis may take years before they impact housing costs,
only expanding rent control can offer immediate relief to millions of
people in danger of being forced from their homes.” 

Montojo and Barton’s report, titled “Opening the Door for Rent
Control: Toward a Comprehensive Approach to Protecting California’s
Renters,”
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of important findings. They noted that rent control “can stabilize
rents for existing tenants, improve affordability for tenants in the
future, and preserve the existing affordability of housing that may
otherwise become unaffordable.” And the researchers found that
claims that “rent control has negative effects on development of new
housing are generally not supported by research” and that “rent
control can provide a timely solution [to a housing affordability
crisis] that the market will not.”

In a statement, Barton further pointed out
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“When the housing market is as dysfunctional as it is in many parts
of California, tenants are effectively subsidizing landlords with rent
payments above what a fully competitive market would allow landlords
to charge.”

That tenant subsidy has paid for extravagant lifestyles for many of
California’s largest corporate landlords, who spent tens of millions
to kill rent control ballot measures in the state. Billionaire Sam
Zell, for example, owns posh homes in Chicago, Sun Valley, New York,
and Malibu
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collects motorcycles, and flies around the world in a private jet.
Another billionaire corporate landlord, Stephen Schwarzman, owns
mansions in Saint-Tropez, Jamaica, East Hampton, and Palm Beach
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throws lavish parties for celebrities and high-society friends.

At the same time, as sky-high rents force more people into the
streets, nearly 1,500 homeless people have died in the Los Angeles
area between 2020 and 2021
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Alisa Belinkoff Katz, a researcher at the UCLA Luskin Center for
History and Policy, examined rent control and housing affordability
crisis in L.A. going back to the 1940s. The UCLA study is
titled “People Are Simply Unable to Pay the Rent: What History
Tells Us About Rent Control in Los Angeles.”
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During World War II, Katz wrote, “federal rent control in Los
Angeles successfully froze rents and narrowed the scope of evictions
until housing construction expanded the city’s housing supply.”
Put another way, rent control kept people housed. 

Then in the late 1970s, as inflation rose and rents spiked, L.A.’s
rent stabilization ordinance “ended dramatic rent increases for
incumbent tenants by limiting the rate by which rents could be
increased.” Once again, people weren’t forced out of their homes.

These days, Katz wrote, the lack of affordable housing, skyrocketing
rents, and declining incomes “have made housing unaffordable for
almost half of middle-income renters and nearly all those who are
poor. This in turn has exacerbated the epidemic of homelessness on our
streets.”

Katz concluded that California elected officials must take “action
to ensure the availability and affordability of rental housing for all
income levels… and [allow] local governments to reassert themselves
in stabilizing rents.” She recommended the repeal or reform of
statewide rent control restrictions and the expansion of rent
regulations such as rent control or rent stabilization.

Katz’s historical perspective is crucial: it shows that solid rent
control policies have succeeded, for decades, in keeping people
housed and preventing them from falling into homelessness
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Big Real Estate will keep shelling out millions to confuse the public
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their anti-rent control arguments, and self-appointed “housing
experts” such as YIMBYs will continue to push for trickle-down
housing solutions
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don’t help the people who need it most. But these studies by USC, UC
Berkeley, and UCLA send a clear message: rent control will quickly
stabilize a housing affordability crisis, prevent homelessness, and,
in fact, save lives. Those are the stone-cold facts. They can no
longer be ignored. 

_Follow Housing Is A Human Right on Facebook
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* Rent Control
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* homelessness
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* gentrification
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