This article doesn't start off well:

> Among economists, rent regulation seems be in similar situation as the minimum wage was 20 years ago. At that time, most economists took it for granted that raising the minimum wage would reduce employment. Textbooks said that it was simple supply and demand — if you raise the price of something, people will buy less of it. But as more state and local governments raised minimum wages, it turned out to be very hard to find any negative effect on employment.

The reason it's hard is that they're not doing controlled experiments. They're not starting in a place with no minimum wage and instituting a significant one. They're starting in a place that already has a minimum wage and enacting a minor increase in the amount.

The existing minimum wage would have already done most of the damage you're trying to measure, but you're folding that into the baseline and ignoring it. All you get is the amount from the increase, which for a modest increase may not rise to the level of statistical significance.

Meanwhile they have biased data, because the state legislatures, if they have any sense of self-preservation, aren't going to enact a minimum wage large enough to damage the local economy. So you have selection bias in the sample, and even at the raised amount, only a low single digit percentage of people are making the minimum wage.

These all make it hard to measure any macro-scale effect because you're making a change to a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the economy.

But he goes from that to a conclusory assumption:

> Today, it is clear that minimum wages do not reduce employment.

Which is facially ridiculous as an absolute declaration. No one can seriously claim that raising minimum wage to a million dollars an hour wouldn't severely reduce employment.

This is a bad sign, and it only continues from there:

> They also found that eliminating rent control also raised rents in homes in the same area that were never subject to the controls, reinforcing the idea that rent control contributes to neighborhood stability.

Plausibly because landlords have little incentive to make improvements to rent controlled properties, which then decompose and negatively impact the quality of the neighborhood, and removing rent control removes that perverse incentive. It's like arguing that maintaining a tire fire on every street corner would reduce rents in the area. Possibly true; still a terrible idea.

Notably this also implies restrictions on new construction, because higher prices should make new construction profitable until prices fall back to the level where it isn't, absent some (e.g. regulatory) constraints.

> The main conclusions from this literature are, first, that rent regulation is effective in limiting rent increases

This is kind of ridiculous. Yes, a law against rent increases will prevent rent increases, by law. The question is, at what cost? And what are the alternatives (e.g. policies to increase housing supply) to achieve the same result without it?

> The absence of rent regulation may also create political obstacles to efforts to increase housing supply, attract new employers, or otherwise improve urban areas, since current residents correctly perceive that the result of any improvement may be higher rents and displacement.

Wait, so people will create obstacles to efforts to increase the housing supply (which should reduce rents) because "current residents correctly perceive" that the result is higher rents?

Meanwhile rent control causes non-improvement of urban areas, because landlords lack the incentive to make improvements if the improvements can't yield higher returns.

There is an obvious contradiction between wanting improvements and not wanting the improvements to increase housing costs, which, all else equal, they would. The way to square the circle is to increase housing supply, so that quality can increase without higher demand bidding up the price of a finite supply.

So this is where we come to the crux of it:

> Fourth, in many high-cost areas, housing supply is relatively fixed. The reason that existing homes in many large cities cost multiple times more than the costs of construction, is that the ability to add new housing in these areas is very limited, by some mix of regulatory barriers like zoning, and physical or economic barriers. In economists’ terms, the supply of housing in these areas is inelastic – it doesn’t respond very much to changes in price.

The conclusion that rent control will do something good is based on the assumption of inelastic housing supply due to regulatory barriers. But that's the real problem that has to be solved, and fixing that relegates rent control back to the dustbin where we found it.