Maybe Your Landlord Isn't EVIL?

The cost of renting is too damn high! But is rent control the solution? Welcome to America Uncovered, I'm Chris Chappell. Like in many parts of the world, the US has a major housing crisis. The cost of buying a house keeps going up, which means more and more people can only afford to rent. But there aren't enough affordable rental units available either. It's getting so bad, kids are going to go from playing with doll houses to doll apartments. They may even make a moving back in with the parents Barbie! According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, the US needs more than 7 million affordable homes for over 10 million extremely low income families. The cost of rent is so high, it's eating up more and more people's incomes. So what's the solution? One option is rent control. Government imposed limits on how much landlords can charge on their properties. Unsurprisingly, this is very popular among renters. After all, the rent is too damn high. And most renters think selfish landlords are the problem. According to a 2024 survey by Navigator, published in May, a majority placed the biggest blame on greedy landlords for housing costs. Maoism intensifies! So who better to take on those greedy landlords than California? It's one of the states that embraces rent control. For California, it happened in 2019, when it passed the Tenant Protection Act. It caps annual rent increases at 5% plus inflation, or 10%, whichever is lower. Though there are exceptions that include units built within the last 15 years, most single family homes and condos, and duplexes with their owners living in one unit. What's left are multi-family buildings, apartments older than 15 years, single family homes or condos owned by corporations or real estate investment trusts, and retail units where the owner doesn't live on site. These are all subject to rent control. So how have things worked out? Has California become an affordable paradise? Well, the short answer is no. The long answer is no. After all, more people are moving out of California than any other state. Now there could be many reasons for it—natural disasters, high gas prices, all the filthy degenerates. But I'm sure part of it is that rental prices in California are insane. Per square foot, they're 55% above the national average. That means the typical California family is paying hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars a month more in rent than the average American. But how is that possible? Rent control was supposed to keep prices down. Obviously, the problem is not enough rent control. That's why Proposition 33 is now being put on the ballot. It would greatly expand the power of counties and city governments to implement more rent control with fewer of the Tenant Protection Act's restrictions. If passed, San Francisco is planning on putting an additional 16,000 apartments under rent control. No word on how this will impact doll apartments. So surely if rent control didn't work, more rent control is the solution. This is similar to how the Netherlands dealt with its own housing crisis. The Netherlands has the highest proportion of rent-controlled homes in Europe. And yet it continued to face a housing shortage. Young people especially were struggling. Housing is so bad that the Netherlands had to reduce international student numbers. And much like California, the Dutch response was to expand rent control. Under a new law passed earlier this summer, the number of Dutch housing units under rent control went up from 79% of its 3 million rental properties to 96%. Almost all rental housing is under rent control. And yet this year, there was a shortage of 400,000 homes, up from 390,000 the year before. Meanwhile, Dutch home prices have reached new records. Now maybe the new rent control measures haven't been in place long enough. It was just passed a few months ago. Maybe next year, prices will go down and there will be a ton of new housing on the market. But right now, it doesn't seem that way. According to Bloomberg News, more and more landlords are selling their properties and getting out of the rental housing market because it's become unprofitable. So if state-enforced rent controls aren't the solution to the housing crisis, what is? Well, look no further than Argentina. Argentina was known to have some of the strictest rent control laws in the world, thanks to the 2020 rental law under then-President Alberto Fernandez. How did that go? Well, by late 2023, one in seven homes in Argentina sat empty, yet Buenos Aires residents struggled to find available rentals. That meant there were over 200,000 empty homes in Buenos Aires. And yet people couldn't find an affordable place to live. But then, in 2023, Libertarian Javier Mille became president. He's an outspoken critic of socialism and state intervention. He ended rent control in Argentina. The result? The housing supply skyrocketed. Rental housing in Buenos Aires jumped almost 200 percent. And many renters are seeing prices go down by 40 percent. Who knew that supply and demand were linked? Sounds like a real deep cut that only economy majors would have heard of. Argentina isn't alone. A meta-analysis of more than 200 rent control studies found that rent controls lead to higher rent in uncontrolled housing, more people living in properties unsuited to their needs, lower labor mobility, lower supply of rental accommodation, lower quality of rental housing, and less new rental housing construction. Heavy government involvement in the economy—that is, socialism—generally creates more problems in the very same sectors it tries to fix. Look no further than... everywhere it's been tried. I also did a deep dive on that, which you can check out by clicking here. Once again, I'm Chris Chappell. Thank you for watching America Uncovered.