As rents soar across California and housing affordability slips further out of reach for millions, an intensifying debate over rent control is being fueled by a growing stack of academic research.
For decades, real estate interests and conservative economists have painted rent control as a failed policy that shrinks housing supply and hurts the very tenants it aims to protect.
But now, a wide array of new studies — from USC, UCLA, UC Berkeley, and even the Harvard Business Review — are making a very different case.
These findings challenge long-standing assumptions in housing policy. While rent control remains controversial, the evidence in its favor is there as well.
One of the most comprehensive syntheses comes from Rent Matters, a report by USC’s Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE). Co-authored by Professor Manuel Pastor, Vanessa Carter, and Maya Abood, the study analyzes dozens of existing rent regulation regimes across the U.S. and beyond.
Their conclusion? Moderate rent stabilization is a useful and underutilized tool in addressing California’s housing crisis.
“Rent regulation does not have the dire economic consequences that critics often claim,” said Pastor. “Instead, it provides stability, especially for communities of color, seniors, and lower-income households — the very people most at risk of displacement.”
The study finds that rent regulations do not significantly suppress new housing construction, particularly when implemented with careful policy design.
Stabilization of rent increases tenant housing stability, which correlates with better health outcomes, school performance, and community engagement. Rent control can also help reduce gentrification-fueled displacement, especially when paired with just-cause eviction protections and affordable housing development.
In 2023, dozens of prominent economists — including Rutgers’ Mark Paul, UMass Amherst’s Isabella Weber, and SEIU’s Chief Economist Janelle Jones — signed a public letter urging the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) to incorporate rent control as a condition for federally backed loans. The letter was a sharp rebuke to market fundamentalism in housing policy.
“Just as the economic consensus on the minimum wage evolved through empirical research, we are seeing the same shift on rent control,” the economists wrote. “Real-world data is consistently showing that rent regulation works — not perfectly, but far better than unregulated market outcomes.”
he letter cited studies from San Francisco, New York, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. One study from MIT, for example, found that after rent control was repealed in Cambridge, rents rose by an average of $131 — the equivalent of nearly $200 today — with no meaningful boost in housing supply.
“Repealing rent control just transferred wealth from tenants to landlords,” said economist David Autor, co-author of the Cambridge study. “It didn’t suddenly unleash a construction boom. That’s a myth.”
Similarly, a widely cited paper by Stanford economist Rebecca Diamond found that expanded rent control in San Francisco helped long-term tenants stay in place, with benefits concentrated among older residents and people of color.
“Rent control policies protected incumbent tenants,” Diamond and her co-authors wrote, “and reduced displacement in a rapidly gentrifying city.”
Perhaps the most compelling case for rent regulation comes not from academic theory, but from scandal. In recent lawsuits filed by the Department of Justice and multiple states, property tech company RealPage is accused of using algorithmic pricing software to facilitate collusion among landlords — pushing rents up while maintaining high vacancy rates.
Landlords in the RealPage network allegedly agreed to follow rent-setting recommendations designed to prioritize profits over full occupancy. According to court filings, this approach led to artificially inflated rents in cities like Phoenix, Dallas, and Sacramento — in some cases by more than 70% over just a few years.
“The evidence shows that landlords deliberately accepted lower occupancy in exchange for higher prices,” said Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, one of the officials suing RealPage. “That’s not a competitive market — that’s a cartel.”
These allegations have cast a long shadow over the argument that deregulation and market competition alone can solve the housing crisis. In the words of Harvard economist Brian Callaci and legal scholar Sandeep Vaheesan, writing in the Harvard Business Review: “The U.S. housing market isn’t failing because of too much government. It’s failing because of unchecked corporate power.”
Despite this growing body of research, rent control remains a deeply polarizing issue. Critics — especially those aligned with the YIMBY (“Yes In My Backyard”) movement — argue that supply constraints, not rent gouging, are at the root of the problem.
“If we simply build more, prices will come down,” said a professor at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs, who supports zoning reform but is skeptical of strict rent caps. “Rent control might help today’s tenants, but if it deters investment or limits future supply, it could hurt tomorrow’s.”
YIMBY advocates emphasize upzoning — the loosening of zoning codes to allow for more multifamily housing — as the key to solving California’s housing woes. They argue that rent control, by reducing the incentive to build, could backfire in the long run.
However, even here the data tells a more complicated story. A co-authored study by Yonah Freemark at the Urban Institute found that the average upzoning resulted in a 0.8% increase in housing supply within the first 3–9 years — hardly a dramatic change. Upzoning, the researchers concluded, is necessary but not sufficient.
“Market reforms can play a role,” said Freemark, “but alone, they don’t deliver affordability at scale. The idea that liberalizing zoning will solve everything is magical thinking.”
What’s emerging from the research is not a binary choice between regulation and construction — but a both/and approach. That means implementing rent stabilization to protect current tenants, enforcing antitrust laws to prevent price-fixing cartels like RealPage, using public planning to align infrastructure with housing growth, and funding social housing that offers dignified, permanently affordable homes.
“Rent control isn’t a silver bullet,” said Vanessa Carter, co-author of Rent Matters. “But when paired with affordable housing production, tenant protections, and planning, it’s a vital part of the solution.” Public sector involvement is already common in other sectors essential to daily life — education, healthcare, utilities. Why should housing, a basic human need, be left entirely to speculative markets?
California remains home to some of the most unaffordable cities in the country, with half of all renters considered cost-burdened. The state is also the epicenter of the homelessness crisis. With wages stagnating and corporate landlords consolidating control over the rental market, the question is not whether rent control is perfect — but whether doing nothing is an option.
“This is not an ideological debate anymore,” said J.W. Mason, an economist at John Jay College. “It’s a question of what actually works. And rent control — done right — works.” The evidence, increasingly, speaks for itself. The only question is whether policymakers are listening.