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Rents all over the country are too darn high – and thanks to the New York City mayoral campaign, discussions about how to control them are back in the national attention.
Housing is at the heart of the campaign of Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee – and “freeze the rent” is one of its key planks. As Mamdani explains it, millions of New Yorkers live in “rent stabilized” homes, where annual increases are determined by a government board. Mamdani says he wants to halt annual increases for four years, after a period in which incumbent mayor Eric Adams allowed rent to rise as much as 9% a year.
While rent stabilization may feel like a holy grail for tenants lucky enough to snag such a deal, limiting how much landlords can charge is a blunt tool that won’t solve the affordability crisis – and might even make it worse, experts say. The best way to make rent more manageable, most housing observers believe, is to take a broad-based approach to overall housing affordability, including by increasing supply and easing local restrictions – which Mamdani has also proposed.
“Rent control lowers costs for some residents, but it raises costs for more residents, so overall that is net negative for affordability,” said Alex Horowitz, project director for housing policy at The Pew Charitable Trusts. “The most important driver of housing affordability is whether there are enough homes. When there aren’t enough homes, that creates competition for homes that are scarce. So prices get bid up and rents get bid up, which creates a long-term seller’s market and a long-term landlord’s market.”
Austin, Denver have seen rents decrease
Such arguments aren’t just economics textbook ideas, say Horowitz and other observers. There are multiple real-world examples of American cities experimenting with increasing supply, and having rents fall as a result.
Salim Furth, an economist who directs the Urbanity project at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, offers Denver and Austin as recent examples.
In Denver, a surge of new construction led to a 6.4% vacancy rate as of this summer, and declining rents, according to a landlord advocacy group. It’s the same story in Austin, where rents are still above where they were pre-pandemic, but down from the 2023 peak. (By contrast, New York City had a vacancy rate of 1.4% as of 2024, the most recent data available.)
Unintended consequences of rent control
Efforts to control rental increases have led to unintended yet serious consequences, observers say.
Gonzalo Respighi Grasso, a Ph.D. candidate in economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has made rent control the focus of his research. He cites a 2019 paper that looked at the effects of implementing rent control in San Francisco in 1994.
Landlords responded to that policy by converting for-rent apartments to owner-occupied condos or by encouraging redevelopment that would allow new construction to be exempt from rent control.
Meanwhile, tenants who lived in homes that became rent-controlled had far less incentive to leave, which wound up limiting their mobility, according to the 2019 paper and other research, Respighi Grasso explained in an interview with USA TODAY.
“Since many of the existing rental properties were converted to higher-end, owner-occupied condominium housing and new construction rentals, the passage of rent control ultimately led to a housing stock which caters to higher income individuals,” the 2019 paper concluded.
“It appears rent control has actually contributed to the gentrification of San Francisco, the exact opposite of the policy’s intended goal. Indeed, by simultaneously bringing in higher income residents and preventing displacement of minorities, rent control has contributed to widening income inequality of the city.”
Should government play a role in housing?
While rent control may not be the panacea some hope for, observers agree that some measure of government assistance is needed, given the scope of the housing crisis.
Across the nation, a whopping half of all renters are “cost-burdened” as of 2023, the most recent data available, meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on housing and utilities. That includes the 27% who spend more than half of their income on those expenses. In New York, that’s 856,800 households, according to an analysis of city data performed by the Citizens Budget Commission for USA TODAY.
“Some people aren’t going to have enough money to afford decent housing, even in a market that has a lot of homes,” Pew’s Horowitz said in an interview. Subsidies such as housing choice vouchers may be solid policy choices for lower-income residents, he said.
And Marie Claire Tran-Leung, who leads the Evictions Initiative Project at the National Housing Law Project, stresses the importance of protections for tenants as prices spike higher in many jurisdictions and the federal government pulls back on housing efforts.
“Rent stabilization works in concert with other tenant protections,” Tran-Leung told USA TODAY. “In this environment, protection against landlord retaliation is especially important because the rents that tenants may have in a given place are only as good as they are enforced.”
NHLP and others are also engaged in efforts to help tenants access legal representation in the court system, she said. “We often work with tenants who may have a viable claim against the landlord but the landlord can easily make a case for nonpayment.”
Contributing: Ignacio Calderon