Why Rent Control Doesn’t Work

San Francisco had rent control, but it didn’t apply many of the city’s smaller apartment buildings. So you can start to see how rent control may be accomplishing a narrow, short-term goal — making existing housing more affordable for a select group of people — at the expense of the long-term goal of making a city more affordable generally. DIAMOND: When you pass rent control, the landlords of the property suddenly getting covered by rent control are losing so much money, they no longer really want to rent their apartments out at the prevailing new prices, so they decrease their supply of rental housing to the market.

Source: freakonomics.com