Rent control sounds really good — who doesn’t want to control the rent when it’s too damn high? — until you try it and it makes matters worse.

Like other price controls, such as the Whip Inflation Now ones of the Ford administration that whipped nothing at all, it pretends you can wave a magic economic wand and keep housing affordable, ignoring the complicated side-effects.

Such as diminishing the supply of housing, which rent control clearly does. In New York City, about 25,000 “rent-stabilized” apartments are listed as “vacant but unavailable for rent,” for instance, because their landlords can’t afford to make necessary renovations. That’s a full-blown tragedy, considering that over 100,000 people sleep in shelters each night there.

Still, the exasperation on the part of especially

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