I have been talking with my ECONS101 class this week about rent controls, which is a topic that I have blogged about many times before (see the links at the end of this post). Economists really dislike rent controls, sometimes in deliberately hyperbolic terms. In one prominent case, the Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck was quoted as saying:
“Rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.”
Lindbeck's statement is based on the evidence that shows the negative impacts of rent controls. One example is described in this 2025 article by Eilidh Geddes (University of Georgia) and Nicole Holz (Northwestern University), published in the Journal of Housing Economics (ungated earlier version here). They looked at the impact of a large-scale rent control expansion in San Francisco in 1994, which removed an exemption from rent control for small (less than five units) owner-occupied buildings built before 1980, on evictions.
Their data are the number of eviction notices, as well as wrongful eviction claims and 'owner move-in' eviction notices at the zip code level, from 1990 to 2010. They apply a continuous treatment difference-in-differences, which essentially compares the change in evictions (or other measure) between zip codes that were more affected by the removal of the exemption and those that were less affected. Their measure of exposure to the treatment is the number of housing units in the zip code that became exposed to rent control policies after the passage of the voter referendum in late 1994. In zip codes where more housing units were affected by the change, we would expect to see greater impacts than in zip codes where fewer housing units were affected. One limitation of this is the data source that Geddes and Holz use, which is based on building data from 1999, five years after the change was implemented. However, they show that three main sources of problems (demolition of buildings between 1994 and 1999, splitting of land parcels, and construction that changed the number of units in each building), do not have much impact on the estimated number of units affected (and so, don't have a large impact on the treatment variable).
In their main analysis, Geddes and Holz find:
...an 83% increase in eviction notices filed with the Rent Board and a 125% increase in the number of wrongful eviction claims for ZIP codes with the average level of new exposure to rent control...
These effects are large and economically significant. We find an annual effect of an increase of 20.07 eviction notices per 1000 treated units in a zip code. Over the six years in our post period (1995–2000), this translates roughly into 12% of newly rent controlled units receiving an eviction notice.
So, the expansion of rent control leads to an increase in evictions. Geddes and Holz also find that the effects:
...are concentrated in low-income areas. These areas are not necessarily those that saw the largest increases in aggregate rents during the 1990s, suggesting that landlords may be more willing to engage in eviction activity in places where there are fewer resources to fight that behavior.
Geddes and Holz caution against taking a broad interpretation of their results though, as the removal of the exemption in 1994 primarily affected small landlords, who are often 'mom and pop' landlords and are able to take advantage of 'owner move-in' eviction provisions that are not available to large corporate landlords. However, the results are consistent with the broader literature, which suggests that tenants may be negatively affected by rent controls.
But not in all ways, it appears. In a more recent article published in the Journal of Health Economics (open access), Geddes and Holz look at the impact of the same 1994 expansion of rent control in San Francisco on intimate partner violence (IPV). They first note that that the effect of rent control on IPV is theoretically ambiguous, and there are two competing models with different predictions:
In the financial strain model, lower housing costs will decrease financial stress, leading to lower levels of violence. The effect of housing policies will thus depend on whether they lower costs for couples. However, in a bargaining model, there is a crucial distinction between policies that shift housing costs overall and those that shift the relative costs of housing inside and outside of the relationship. Policies that decrease housing costs overall will change the amount of resources in the relationship to be bargained over, but will not shift the bargaining power in the relationship. However, policies that decrease housing costs inside the relationship relative to those outside of the relationship will change the attractiveness of the outside option, shifting bargaining power away from the woman.
The empirical setup in this research is the same as for their earlier research on evictions. The difference is that the outcome variable of interest is IPV, measured as:
...the number of hospitalisations resulting from assaults that comes from California’s Department of Health Care Access and Information (HCAI, formerly OSHPD) from 1990–2000.
In their main analysis, Geddes and Holz find that:
...for every one percent increase in exposure to rent control in a ZIP code, hospitalized assaults on women decline by 0.08 percent. In levels, this translates to an almost 10 percent decrease in violence against women for the average ZIP code.
They find no corresponding decrease in assaults on men, which suggests that their results are not driven by an overall decline in assaults (including non-IPV assaults). They also find no effect on reported accidents, which suggests that their results are not driven by changes in the propensity to report IPV. Interestingly, they also find:
...no evidence of changes in household size or composition, suggesting that our results are driven by changes in violence within relationships rather than changes in cohabitation or relationship dissolution.
Overall, their results are most consistent with the financial strain model of IPV. Based on that model, we interpret these results as showing that rent controls, by reducing housing costs (and it is worth noting that housing costs in San Francisco are, and have been for some time, very high), decrease conflict within intimate relationships, and decrease IPV.
So, at least there is some evidence for positive effects of rent control. These results also sit alongside earlier evidence from the same rent control expansion, which showed short-run gains for incumbent tenants, but long-run reductions in the supply of rental housing units, as well as an increase in inequality. However, few people are advocating for rent control policies in order to reduce intimate partner violence. And benefits in terms of reduced violence have to be weighed against all of the other negative consequences of rent control policies, many of which are outlined in the posts linked below.
Read more:
- Why rent controls have worse effects over longer time horizons
- The deadweight loss of rent control
- The deadly consequences of rent control in Mumbai
- Rent control and inequality in San Francisco
- Rent control and the redistribution of wealth
- Rent control and vacant properties in India
- Rent control according to Seinfeld
- There should be no debate at all about rent controls
- Rent controls make many tenants worse off in the Netherlands
