Rent control makes California’s housing crisis worse

Editor’s note: This is the seventh installment in a series examining the roots of America’s housing crisis. To read the earlier pieces, visit the roots of today’s housing crisis .

In the 1960s, the free-market economist Assar Linbeck described rent control as “the most efficient technique so far known for destroying cities — except for bombing.” In 1989, Communist Vietnam’s foreign minister, Nguyen Co Thach, implied that rent control was worse than bombing when he said, “The Americans couldn’t destroy Hanoi, but we have destroyed our city by very low rents.” In a 1990 survey of 464 economists spread across the political spectrum, 93 percent agreed that a “ceiling on rent reduces the quantity and quality of housing available.”

Despite universal agreement that rent control doesn’t work