Rent control is always initially popular with the people who are already in apartments. But it is longer term effects on supply and quality that are corrosive.

An alternative is Austin:

https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/22/austin-texas-rents-f...

"Austin rents have fallen for nearly two years. Here’s why.

Austin rents have tumbled for 19 straight months, data from Zillow show. The typical asking rent in the capital city sat at $1,645 as of December, according to Zillow — above where rents stood prior to the pandemic but below where they peaked amid the region’s red-hot growth.

Surrounding suburbs like Round Rock, Pflugerville and Georgetown, which saw rents grow by double-digit percentages amid the region’s pandemic boom, also have seen declining rents. Rents aren’t falling as quickly as they rose during the pandemic run-up in costs, but there are few places in the Austin region where rents didn’t fall sometime in the last year.

The chief reason behind Austin’s falling rents, real estate experts and housing advocates said, is a massive apartment building boom unmatched by any other major city in Texas or in the rest of the country. Apartment builders in the Austin area kicked into overdrive during the pandemic, resulting in tens of thousands of new apartments hitting the market."

I'm all for building more housing, but in places that already have an affordability problem, removing rent control before building more housing would just displace people overnight.

I live in SF and wish we would build as much and as quickly as Austin has been building. But, if we could do that, we shouldn't consider eliminating rent control until after those units are on the market.

Extra supply is helping, but I would argue back-to-office and layoffs are the primary culprit.

You're not competing with 4+ techbros to an apartment in downtown Austin anymore.

Anecdotally, the local tech meetups are WAY off in participation since about June. About 1/3 of the people who used to regularly attend have completely left the city.

It's kind of incredible how the obvious and true solution to rents being too high is to BUILD MORE HOUSES and yet somehow people manage to convince themselves that in fact, the real solution to rents being to high is to artificially cap their prices. Incredible stupidity.

There's two vectors here and people seem to not realize that, isolated from the short term suffering going on right now.

Rental control is short term relief. Obviously, using short term solutions long term is bad. This shouldn't be an enigma.

Building housing is long term. We cannot build new houses in a year. At least, not that I know of. But new houses in 4 years does not help the citizens knocked onto the streets in those times.

You need to relive those people while also securing the future. That's why rent control fails without a proper housing reform.

You can't be mad at a pipe bursting that you used duct tape to cover. But maybe that duct tape buys you time to find a plumber, who needs time to find the right size pipes. So duct tape is still really useful, just not the end all be all.

Mamdani is doing both though, in a controlled manner. He voted to oppose NIMBYism as well and has a plan for new construction.