Talk about organizational mission creep. Once again, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation has qualified a ballot measure intended to expand rent control across California. And once again, Californians will have to defeat the economically illiterate and intellectually vacuous proposal.
The misleadingly-named Justice for Renters Act seeks to repeal the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, which prohibits governments from imposing rent control on properties built after February 1995.
Supporters of the measure wrongly believe rent control measures will make California more affordable and meaningfully help local governments get homelessness under control.
Anyone vaguely familiar with the real world knows this is nonsense. San Francisco and Los Angeles both have had rent control policies on the books for decades. And both are shining examples for the rest of California and, indeed, the rest of the nation, of the failure of rent control to achieve any of its intended aims.
We ask anyone remotely tempted to buy the talking points of rent control proponents to consider whether San Francisco or Los Angeles are examples of affordability in California. Then consider how well both cities are doing in containing homelessness.
Rent control in both San Francisco and Los Angeles has not only failed on both fronts, but in is a factor in making the availability of housing worse.
To understand this, one need only skim the introductory chapter of any standard economics textbook.
Rent controls, by definition, are artificial limits on the revenue property owners can receive for their investments. Property owners, as rational actors, respond accordingly.
Some respond by pulling their properties from the rental market entirely and converting their properties to other uses, like condos.
Others, including developers, abandon plans to build or make available additional rental housing units.
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The net result, over time, is a shortage of rental housing and, therefore, decreased housing affordability for anyone not covered by rent control.
Fortunately, majorities of Californians understand this. Rent control measures have been rejected by voters in 2018 and 2020. In fact, nearly 60% of Californians rejected rent control in 2020.
And yet, thanks to the sponsors of the rent control measure — including the far-left California Nurses Association, best known for its socialist push for government-run health care in California — Californians will once again be bombarded with nonsensical rhetoric about the “need” for rent control and the ongoing perversion of the word “justice.”
Solving California’s high housing costs isn’t complicated: Supply and demand. Make it easier for housing to be built. Over time, people will find the housing they can afford. It’s not hard. Just get government out of the way and ignore the dorm-room delusions of progressives who think rent control is anything but a foolish policy.