Rent Control Explained: Debunking Your Landlord's Myths 

Mortgage rates are currently at an all time high since 2000(23 years) and based on statistics on inflation, we might see that number skyrocket further, a 30-year fixed rate was only 5% this time last year, so do I just keep waiting for a housing crash before buying or redirect my focus to the equity market

As a St. Paul resident, my landlord was only able to raise my rent by $30 June 1st thanks to the new legislation. Them being able to raise rent by whatever price they want would be impossible for people to afford staying due to wages being stagnant..

I know properties all over the city I live in that will ask for 2000+ USD per month for a one bedroom, one kitchen flat that haven't had a tenant in a decade or more. I know folks that were willing to pay these extortion prices for a flat, where the landlord mysteriously went silent or suddenly found another tenant when they mentioned the partner that will be living with them is either of the same gender, is transgender, or goes by a non-binary pronoun. Landlords are parasites on society that will lie through their teeth if it means they can raise their profits or keeping a minority group from their properties.

I was looking for something that was a strong argument FOR rent control / stabilization. However this WAS NOT it. While the personal stories are important, they do not address the economic arguments around RC/RS. If someone has a life event that causes financial hardship, there should be social programs that steps in, but that should NOT be addressed by RC/RS. RC/RS does cause a shrinking of the rental pool, and a lowering of rental property quality. There are several proven economic factors for that, and too many examples in the US to support this. There is nothing in this video to viably support a counter argument. The reason that RC/RS tends to get interest and bills are passed is because of these kinds of social stories, but not economic reality. More people understand the former rather than the later, and people = votes. So far I have only heard of ONE example where RC/RS worked. That is in Austria, but technically this wasn't RC/RS that worked. RC/RS was used as a vehicle for the city of Vienna to buy up properties from former landlords after poisoning the rental market. Once they crashed the rental market with RC/RS, they were able to step in. The city effectively became a socially motivated monopoly landlord, and sets rents based on a balance of overall need, and induvial circumstance. It is the only example where property quality did not decline, because the city itself guaranteed it's maintenance in a zero-profit model. I would be interested if anyone has another positive example. The "Vienna" model is unlikely to get any traction in the US since it requires both a very strong socialist mentality, and a city with a lot of money to buy the properties. As far as I know neither of those exist here. I believe the closest we could hope to get in the US would be a significant expansion of well-targeted Section8 vouchers, or a local property tax increase that was then directed to building city-owned housing for those with low means, and/or high needs. Since these really do target the REAL problem which is the supply of housing. RC/RS has shown many times that is does the exact opposite and reduces that supply.

Development DECREASED more than 60% in St Paul and INCREASED in Minneapolis over 60% since St Paul's rent control went into effect. New York has had the longest running rent control in the country San Francisco has had the second longest run. New York and San Francisco also have the highest rents in the country. This quote in 2018 from a Brooking Institute analysis says much: "While rent control appears to help current tenants in the short run, in the long run it decreases affordability, fuels gentrification, and creates negative spillovers on the surrounding neighborhood." There is a reason that literally more than l90% of economists from both left and right agree rent control is detrimental overall.

I think a decent amount of people think landlords are individuals. In florida, lot of complexes are ran by property management who prioritize shareholder dividends. Many are like renting from a buy here pay here, slap a pretty bandaid on it until someone signs a contract.

Landlords wants rent to pay their mortgage if no rent coming up no mortgage is paid … Meaning the bank will take over the apartment complex and the landlord will be homeless too .

9:10 Not so fun fact, basically no cities or states in the US keep track of which houses are currently occupied, who owns them, or requires real names for owners. Simply asking the local water+electric utility to find out which houses are drawing water+electricity to attempt to find this out is considered a massive overreach into corporate private knowledge. The US census also doesn't publish a list of which addresses they've knocked on, and the 2010 census had a 22% self reported non response rate, and the 2020 census is largely considered terrible and borderline nonusable because the Trump admin ended it a month early, explicitly went after immigrant groups with harassment and generally completed the already poor process worse than normal.

The problem with this comes when taxes and insurance cost start rising faster then the landlord can increase rent due to the 3% cap. My insurance jumped 12% this year and county taxes 8% due to "inflation" but if i was capped at 3% i would be forced to sell the house vs keep renting it. I simply wouldnt pay the mortgage.

Not even 5 months after it passed - the law was overhauled. Why? Well- new construction was halted and nobody could get financing to build housing. Unintended consequences when you put in price controls. St. Paul will have housing permits-just in the form of luxury housing.

Rent control stops all new development

Noticed how they focused in on bigger property management companies. They say nothing about families in the next tier that own a single property. Inflation goes up, but there's nothing they can do to finance repairs, upgrades or quality of life for their tenants.

Wages have gone up a lot. Rent control doesn’t solve anything it makes cities worse. Crime worse in areas with rent control too because they can’t evict gang members.

Y’all know rent control fucks over renters that don’t benefit from rent control. Landlords jack up the price to new tenants to price in future rent increase caps.

Gross cherry-picking at 8:02. Read the full text on the screen, not just the highlighted portion. The video highlights that beneficiaries were "10 to 20 percent more likely to stay in their homes long-term." Narrator ignores: ❗"these welfare benefits were offset by 𝐝𝐞𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐚𝐯𝐚𝐢𝐥𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐬" ❗"rent regulations also likely fueled the 𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐟 𝐒𝐚𝐧 𝐅𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐨." ❗"landlords utilized loopholes allowing them to 𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐯𝐞 𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐰𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐛𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐳𝐞𝐝 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭." ❗"subsequent 𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐝𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐬." Guys, this is IN THE VIDEO ITSELF. The video is titled "Debunking Your Landlord's Myths", but even the studies picked by the video creators prove landlords correct on this matter. This is basically what's happening: Landlords: "If you implement rent control, we'll stop building housing." NIMBYs: "That's a myth. Landlords won't stop building housing because of rent control." Landlords: *stops building housing* NIMBYs: "OMG, who could have seen this coming? There's no way rent control had anything to do with it."

landlords are NOT government!!! are you going to ask grocery stores to give free groceries????

I despise the landlord as any other renter would. However, the question on my mind, is *what do we want landlords to do?* Do we want them to get less profit from running apartments? Do we want them to leave the renting business and sell their apartments? Or else?

How can you stabilize rent but don't stabilize property taxes, insurance rates, maintenance costs, and all the other expenses? Everyone only looks at one side of the coin.

Before talking about rent control talk and APROVE CONTROL ON PROPERTY TAXES, CONTROL ON INSURANCE, CONTROL ON UTILITIES , CONTROL ON MORTGAGES, CONTROL ON REPAIRS. THEN WE CAN AGREE ON RENT CONTROL

Mankato MN- on the surface it seems like MN nice but underneath is a regime of middle class homeowner clienteleism and unaffordable housing. Not very hospitable to low wage workers. The metro area only has ~100k people.

Here in NYC they built a bunch of luxury apartments and many of them sit empty because most people can afford it. The problem is mismanagement and greed.

A bit of looking into this subject, seems property tax is a base issue here.. but whats stopping people from building cheaper residences?

The 3% cap is still too much of a yearly increase for many. For example 3% of $1800 monthly rent is $54, so in two years your already paying about $110 a month more. Income is not keeping up with these increases and with the inflation in general. More has to be done. We have to challenge the idea of housing as a commodity and think of housing as a basic human right.

Ya gotta have a law that protects landlords too.

Rent control goes against the principal of a free economy. Income property owners are the only industry where there is price controls. Rent control limits the desire to build apartment units. Less units creates more demand, which thereby escalates rents. Every economist will cite this principal. Study after study shows that where there are jurisdictions with rent control create higher rents. The market should determine the rental value.

I love this channel, and I’m not even American! ☺️

I absolutely despise all people that are decades in a rent control building.. Ridiculous trash of society taking advantage of landlords

Rent control can work it just depends on how it works, for Berlin and San Francisco they made it so that old and unimproved homes rents were frozen preventing gentrification and making it so that to make more money you'll have to build or improve the homes.

Hot take, I guess: Everyone should have access to free housing. Like, if you want to save up and buy a home, thats great. But an option free at the point of service should always exist for housing (etc.) Sorry, not sorry. Fight me.

help me with the math please, I went to public school, landlord cost for upkeep is $1000/month, but landlord is forced to collects $700/month, how much does landlord need to continue providing rentals to his other tenants?

You must give developers and financial incentive to build low cost housing. You must give landlords a financial incentive to properly maintain their buildings. Otherwise the housing market will be stagnant and demand for housing will skyrocket.

We need rent caps nation wide in America...

Where are all these men who need to take care of their children? This is not the job of the taxpayer.

Putting a cap on rent at the same time that property taxes, insurance, repairs, etc are going up will result in landlords selling the houses. This means less available rentals which increases the cost of rent due to supply and demand.

Rent control is total BS, period.

Can we stop all the b.s. and just build more housing? This will make a huge dent in this problem. Govt is the root cause. This can all be fixed if red tape and regulations were eased on builders. This "problem" has been around for many decades, and few viable options have come to fruition when govt is involved. It's all by design, by our govts.

The reason why rents are so high today is because of the housing shortage, the rent moratorium during Covid, and beyond, and all of the free money people were given. There is too much money in circulation now and inflation has done its thing. Welcome to the new paradigm.

Currently live in a part of Saint Paul which is receiving major investment in public transportation. Definitely would be rent hiked out of my apartment without this ordinance in place

Renters can be so ignorant!!😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂 They don’t see how rent control only makes it worse for renters. Landlords have no problem selling their home at a profit. By selling it…they now remove it from the rental market leaving a renter with one place less to go.

It's not the landlords job to show sympathy. You failed to save a emergency fund. It's unfortunate but it's on you! Not the landlord.

If inflation is 7% and rent hikes can only go up 3%, the landlord will lose money. What will happen is that landlords will no longer fix things. Also all market-driven construction will cease if the builder cannot make a profit. Folks, it works like this: either the builder and landlords make money or no new housing stock is made available. The only building that will take place is public housing, but the benevolence of taxpayers is not limitless.

Lower property taxes and rent won’t increase !!!

The fact is, renters pay for the landlords home, in full, and extra on top. Once the homes paid for, the landlord aquired a free home. Thats the problem here. Why the hell are people allowed to use the top necessity, besides food and water, to profit? Its BS. Shelter is a right. 50 percent of the mortgage should be max rent. Having half of your house paid for is still a win, and its a win for the renters. Dont wanna do that? DONT OWN NUMEROUS HOMES ABD LET PEOPLE HAVE A HOME TO CALL THEIR OWN!!!!

The problem with that it is a near guarantee landlords will always increase by the cap and have also start with a higher asking price, i.e. drive rents up. When inflation is running at over 10% presumably you would be OK to have your salary increases legally capped at 3% to stabilise the economy and control inflation.

.....how does running a highway through a black neighborhood in the 60s have anything to do with debunking rent control?

You mean "bare maximum" for rent.

Rent control will hurt minority landlords and cause them to lose there property. Black ownership will definitely decline.

I'm ok with high rent because I'm collecting, not paying😅

The solution is not rent control it's to take advantage of programs that help you buy your own home. In many cases with no money down! Totally take the landlord out of the equation, you get the equity, and in 10 years no more rent, it's yours free and clear!

I would hug this woman right now- my landlord is a pig also

Two points to make: The real problem is that more affordable housing is needed with builders incentivized to build the units. The economics have to work. The only way to reduce the cost of building affordable housing is through changing zoning laws to permit more dense housing. However, people who own property in the neighborhoods with proposals to increase the density are adamantly opposed as it might reduce the value of their property. They mentioned in the news story that the jury is still out on the impact of rent control in St. Paul, however, every indication is that new construction permits are down significantly. This could have a negative impact on the future of the city and the quality of the housing stock.

I'm a older guy when I was younger they dedent have a lease if you want the apartment and the landlord wants to rent it to you you got it send a check to him and call him if you need something no security deposit no bull rent was affordable reasonable now its close to a 1000 dollars you pay all utilities and they tell you what you can do and what you can't do charge you for everything you do if you have a pet or have someone stay with you and they own how many properties

Okay ✅ ❓ 2030 - 2040, 2 Bedroom Apartment will be $5,500 - $ 6,500 a month 🇺🇸💔 Don’t say I didn’t warn you

Aww poor babies can't afford rent.

Yeah, cause this worked SO well in St. Paul, didn't it?

I lived in a rent controlled apartment in Brookline MA for nearly 14 years during the late 1970s - 1980s. During that time I had a level of housing security that I wish I had now. I was active with the local tenant union and worked for the statewide tenant organization, which mobilized tenants to defend their interests. I can testify that rent control does not lead to rental housing deteriorating or drive landlords out of business. But it does give working people more control over their housing. Bring tenant organizing and rent control back!

Why the hell would we create a market for something as basic as housing. How does no one think that's a very stupid idea especially considering wages are not attached to inflation. Americans need to THINK

Vote to take a way or take control of other peoples property? Taking other peoples property with out their consent is defined as stealing. Would you steal from other people? That is what this video is asking you to do.

It's happening everywhere. Not just San Francisco. Really bad in Detroit

#EATTHELANDLORDS

together for 7 years. He didn't have live insurance and have her on it? She is a older lady. She never worked? You have to realize you have to prepare. If you are not a top earner you have to work whether part time or full. People don't want their rents raised and I understand that but the first lady that came on didnt make any money!!! Also the price of things go up. I do not like when landlords raise rent on current tenants by $200-$500 a month but going up by $30-70 is a must. Possibly some states/cities $100.

Wake up people we are headed forward socialist country !!

2:00 Not so fun fact, besides being an admission of encouraging arson and insurance fraud for profit, this was routinely done in NYC throughout the 1970s and beyond. More than 10,000 apartments were destroyed this way.

This video is a little disappointing in that it does not actually 'Debunk Landlord's Myths' contrary to what the video title overtly states. The narrator openly says that "we don't yet know what the effect will be..." of rent controls on the local area, as there has not been enough time to observe the effect. I was reasonably expecting to see a logical argument actually 'debunking' the belief that 'rent controls will reduce housing supply in the long run and make the rental situation even worse', but no real effort seems to have been made to logically debunk that argument. What the video does do is that it promises to argue from the logical side of the argument, while it actually argues mostly from the emotional side of the argument, which again is very misleading and damaging to their cause in the end. Not only is this video disappointing, it actually gives the impression that the creators of this video have NO robust argument against the prevailing belief that 'rent controls reduce the incentive for developers to invest into building new rental housing in the area which directly results in less availability of rental housing in the end'. I am happy to hear from both sides of the argument on this issue, but this video is very disappointing in presenting the argument stated in its title. To their limited credit the creators of this video do seem have some kind of a logical indirect argument in that after watching this video I do get the feeling that some compromise is possible. So, placing some rent increase caps is I think might be possible as long as these caps are not too low, for example they must at minimum match the rate of inflation. So the suggested cap on the increase of rents at 3% obviously would not work in the current state of inflation being much higher than 3%. I think a compromise is possible, but I am not under the impression that the creators of this video are looking for a compromise resulting in a win-win situation. I could be wrong.

i think you phrase it very poorly when you say that they can just raise rent only after the other agreement is over and it is time for them to either move or accept the new price

So y’all didn’t have life insurance? That would of bailed you out. What you expect Living off your husband. Why does everybody ask for handouts when they didn’t push themselves to make the best opportunity out of life.

18 million empty homes kept as investment properties in the US to some 600,000 homeless. There’s an easy solution, cap rent at 1/3 the full time minimum wage. There’s also the Maoist route and frankly I’m cool with it. I had a house fire recently and wound up homeless for a month, between motels and Airbnb shit was rough. Hell the Airbnb I was in was in a subdivision full of them, it was clearly just investment properties. $50/night times 4 bedrooms kept occupied is a lot of fucking profit for these big real estate firms

If these people spent their energy working and saving money, they wouldn't have any problem buying their own house.

Please talk about Ecosia they are a search engine that plants trees

Okay... the discussion about rent control and new housing supply... at 10:55, "the power of wealth in developers' hands... what about the people who control whether new housing supply is in our future?" Yes, that's certainly an issue. Totally agree. But, is anyone going to FORCE a wealthy potential developer to build in a rent-controlled area? Which wealthy developer is going to choose to build there as opposed to an uncontrolled area? I agree, that's the crux of the problem. But nobody can be forced to build. If we want to stabilize housing costs, build a lot, everywhere, all pricing tiers. But who is going to do the building and what can we COMPEL them to do?

Yeah don’t mention that the U.S. is 4 million housing units short, due to lack of construction, but yeah let’s make it harder to build more housing!

There is more to this story that they are expressing. And I wouldn't use San Francisco as a positive example. Because we would need to include the homeless situation in both New York, and San Fransisco.

so the reason for rant prices going up is based off Tax, bad laws, and inflation. If you want to lower rent prices, stop voting for people who over spend in the government and do nothing. Vote to lower taxes, better laws, and lower inflation. You can also thank Biden for the increase in rent as well. Also, there are slum lords and land lords. Difference is one wants money the other cars for about you. When tax increase all land lords need to pay it so they have to add it to the rent price. So Renters end up paying it stacked with bad laws and Covid. Some renters didnt pay rent for months to years so renters needed to make up that loss. Best advise is remove 2018-2021 from those studies.

Rent stabilization it helps the renters stay within budget and actually stay in the city where they actually actively work and actually play don’t forget further a person has to go the less likely they are wanting to spend in the place actually working because one stuff would be actually expensive to the further out you go you’re not gonna want to spend a whole bunch of stuff because you gotta think of how you’re going to get it there. How are you gonna take it away all the while also being in, you know a safe condition because a lot of places might not have safe conditions. Where they are located and plus it keeps the residence in the city where there actually are working at the further out you go they might find other places to work that is actually closer and they might not have to spend a lot to actually go back-and-forth to work place and also don’t forget the further out you are There’s a good chance that you might end up getting fired because there’s also a higher chance of you being late, and a lot of Employers might not always understand that.

The fact that 3% rent increase is too low but a 3% raise for a wage is considered a good raise explains so much.

If the city can cap rents, then the county should cap property tax.

Abolish renting for big corporations. Incentivize individual ownership. Cap individual landlords to own and rent so many properties.

In 10 years, my rent has increased from $700 per month to $1700 for the same apartment, same appliances, and same everything. That's about 10% per year in rent increases with no value added.

Landlord: If I can't raise your rent by it more than 3% of a year then I won't be able to reinvest in fixing up the place and making it better The place: hasn't had the landlord do any of the things that they were supposed to, person pays out of pocket to fix it themselves

This is the on the ground reporting the mainstream absolutely neglects. What a valuable channel, thank you for all you do.

2:58 Rent Control is a Price Ceiling, not a Price Floor.

This video uses terms interchangeably that don't mean the same thing. "Rent Control" and "Rent Stabilization" are not the same thing. The bill passed, the first of its kind as the video states, is "rent stabilization" -- it limits the rate of rent increase. Landlords are STILL allowed to raise rents, just not by a certain amount. "Rent Control" is when a hard limit is placed on the price of rent, above which landlords are not allowed to raise rent. The broad consensus among economists is that rent control stifles supply within rent-controlled localities. You could make the argument "actually, there's nothing about rent control that prevents landlords and developers from building new housing!" and you'd be technically correct. It's true, developers won't stop building housing... they'll just build the housing somewhere outside the rent-controlled city, i.e., the suburbs and exurbs. This means housing is pushed further and further away from places of work and existing neighborhoods. This means housing sprawls and sprawls and more families are forced into car dependency in order to get to work. This video lumps both "rent control" and "rent stabilization" together under the umbrella term "rent regulation", then proceeds to say that everything bad said about "rent control" is false because "rent regulations" are shown to keep people in their homes. You see the verbal gymnastics going on here? Watch the video again and note how the narrator hops between these three terms without defining each separately. The video also uses "St. Paul", "Minneapolis", and "The Twin Cities" interchangeably, even though the rent stabilization in question only applies to St. Paul, not to Minneapolis. They're two adjacent but separate cities. While hopping back-and-forth between talking about St. Paul and Minneapolis, the video glosses over the fact that the rent stabilization was next to useless at 9:20 because the raise cap was 3% but without rent control rent would not have gone up by that much anyway. The most egregious omission in this video is the fact that Minneapolis (remember, the city opposite of rent-stabilized St. Paul) has seen RENT GO DOWN by hundreds of dollars this year. There's no mention about how five years ago Minneapolis (not St. Paul) abolished single-family zoning. and have been building thousands and thousands of units each of the last 5 years, making Minneapolis the only city in the country where market rate rent is going down WITHOUT RENT CONTROL. In a video about preventing displacement from gentrification, why was there no mention of this????? I wanted to like this video -- all the families and activists seem like genuine people who worked really hard for their city. Even though I don't like rent control, I do like rent stabilization, so I can appreciate the work the activists were doing. And the production quality of the video was great. But sadly, I'm giving it a dislike because of the terrible writing. I dislike this video because people are probably going to watch it and come away more ignorant and misinformed than they were before watching this video.

My rent just increased by $348-- per month due to market value. What do I receive?????? NOTHING.

Good vid! Keep it up!

There is rent control, then there should be price control for at least hydro, water, gas, property tax and interest rates.

The very short clip in this video is very true about burning down rent controlled apartment buildings. I am from NY and saw this with my own eyes. The landlord's would burn the buildings and collect the insurance money because they could not raise the rent. This was an epidemic back in the 1970s and the 1980s. The buildings are all old decrepit falling apart and in dire need of repair and the landlords did not have the money to fix them.

An unfortunate situation but landlords have bills to pay too. I didn't buy rental property to so I could start a charity. I didn't it so I could make a profit. Not the kind of profit YOU think I should make but the kind of profit that I want to make. 😎👌

I sold off my rental houses to New home owners due to recent rent control laws in my area.😊

Rent control always results in lower supply in housing and lower supply of housing always results in higher rent

This is what capitalists wanted and vote for. This is what corporate Dems and conservatives fight for. They want capitalism.

When your plumbing needs repair we can let the rent control advocates pay for it...

This was really great. Thank you again for putting such effort in simply explaining such things.

Lol, ok then, feel free to advocate an idiotic policy that the entire economics profession has agreed is horrible since the late 1800s. “rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city-except for bombing” - Assar Lindek, a Swedish socialist economist

Why is everything about race?

Rent control would get these hedgefund owners out of the realestate biz and enable more individuals to buy houses at a reasonable rate. People used to buy a house or two and rent it out for retirement income. Now hedgefunds throw money at housing like they printed it themselves. Soon no city will be affordable for anyone making less than a tenured doctor or successful lawyer.

"First bill of it's kind, and not enough research to know what it will do to new development" 10:44 okay so they don't have a leg to stand on with this video

I wanted to like this video, but it mostly tries to appeal to emotion without showing real data to support the effectiveness of their approach, and actually debunk the claims of their opponents. They also made no mention of single family residential zoning laws that essentially make high density housing illegal in many cities in the US, constricting housing supply in areas with growing populations.

Buy land and build yourself a home

The rent is out control. I feel bad for low income people. I rent out a house for 30% less than I could get. But my tenants are great and take care of my house, which is why I charge less rent.