Rent control policies are gaining momentum on the campaign trail and in state houses. New research, though, confirms something economists have argued for a long time: rent control has serious adverse effects that undermine its rationale..
In 1921, Argentina’s per capita GDP stood at roughly two-thirds of the United States’. That year, facing a postwar housing shortage, Congress froze rents nationwide at their January 1920 levels; the following year, in Ercolano v. Lanteri de Renshaw, the Supreme Court upheld the freeze as a valid, if temporary, exercise of the state’s police power. The law was written to expire in two years. It did not: rent control, reinvented under one emergency after another, remained a fixture of Argentine law until it was finally repealed by decree in December 2023. Argentina’s GDP per capita today is roughly one-sixth of the United States’. A century holds too many wars, defaults, and coups to blame on a single statute, but the doctrine at the heart of Ercolano — that “temporary” and “emergency” suffice to suspend a constitutional guarantee — is precisely the kind of exception that, once accepted, never runs out of emergencies to justify itself. I discuss this more extensively here:
In 1921, Argentina’s per capita GDP stood at roughly two-thirds of the United States’. That year, facing a postwar housing shortage, Congress froze rents nationwide at their January 1920 levels; the following year, in Ercolano v. Lanteri de Renshaw, the Supreme Court upheld the freeze as a valid, if temporary, exercise of the state’s police power. The law was written to expire in two years. It did not: rent control, reinvented under one emergency after another, remained a fixture of Argentine law until it was finally repealed by decree in December 2023. Argentina’s GDP per capita today is roughly one-sixth of the United States’. A century holds too many wars, defaults, and coups to blame on a single statute, but the doctrine at the heart of Ercolano — that “temporary” and “emergency” suffice to suspend a constitutional guarantee — is precisely the kind of exception that, once accepted, never runs out of emergencies to justify itself. I discuss this more extensively here:
https://newcriterion.com/article/separated-at-ercolano/