Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 108 of Jeffrey Miron’s and Pedro Aldighieri’s paper “Under Rent Controls, Everyone Pays,” which is Chapter 8 of The War on Prices: How Popular Misconceptions About Inflation, Prices, and Value Create Bad Policy (Ryan A. Bourne, ed. 2024):

Theory predicts that, by capping prices, binding rent controls discourage upkeep and improvements on rent-controlled units, resulting in lower property values. To avoid controls, landlords convert rental units to condos and sell them, reducing the quantity of rent-controlled housing and creating rental housing shortages. Tenants in rent-controlled units tend to become fixed in place to avoid losing access to below-market rents. Just eviction clauses make it more difficult to get rid of bad tenants, leading landlords to impose costly screening on all prospective renters and charge all tenants more to compensate for the risk of bad ones. By and large, empirical evidence confirms all these predictions.