It blows my mind that people can read this headline and not be in favor of rent control, which is a cap of rent increase of say 4% in year in effort to keep rents from running away from inflation. What is anyone to do if the default is that you will be priced out otherwise? Move farther and farther and farther from your job cleaning a downtown office? When is enough? When it's a 4 hour bus ride and you only have time to go immediately to sleep when you get home?
It's not sustainable when landlords are only incentivized to take as much as humanely possible from their tenants. The median worker already coughs up 45% of their wages to their landlord in Los Angeles. Eventually there won't be any more to squeeze; the working poor are already living on top of eachother in crampt apartments. Skilled laborers go begging for work in home depot parking lots while infrastructure falls apart and needed homes fail to get built, what a country.
If there's a shortage of bread, prices of bread will go up. The price is a symptom, the problem is not the price, it's the scarcity. Prices are simply an expression of scarcity.
The worst thing to do if there's a shortage of bread and thereby a shortage of bread bakers, is to put a cap on bread prices and reduce the bakers' incentives.
If there's issues of inequity (e.g. the poor being unable to afford bread) then you can tax the general economy progressively (taxing the rich the most), and then redistribute money to the poor, subsidising their purchase of bread. This equalises consumption, but it does not artificially lower prices with a cap, thereby keeping incentives to bake bread high, which is the primary way to addressing the scarcity.
Rent subsidies and income redistribution, sure, but rent caps aren't necessarily great instrument.
Except that doesn't happen in a shortage of bread, because the government steps in to protect against price gouging in order to ensure everyone has a chance to eat, not just the rich.
It's not sustainable when landlords are only incentivized to take as much as humanely possible from their tenants. The median worker already coughs up 45% of their wages to their landlord in Los Angeles. Eventually there won't be any more to squeeze; the working poor are already living on top of eachother in crampt apartments. Skilled laborers go begging for work in home depot parking lots while infrastructure falls apart and needed homes fail to get built, what a country.