As someone in Boston, I can tell you that rent control was terrible here. The rent controlled units went to people with high incomes and political power (including mayors and those sitting on the Supreme Judicial Court). Most rent controlled units were simply taken off the market in one way or another. If you're getting well below market rent, you tend to look for other ways to use the property and some just allowed relatives or friends to use it rather than bothering with renting, but a lot converted them into condos. The effect was the same - people had to move.

Even the Boston Phoenix (the leftist alternative paper akin to New York's Village Voice) came out against it.

The fact is that when you put price controls in place, who gets something is determined by factors other than what you're willing to pay for it. In housing, that means:

1. Will you bribe people? Will you bribe the landlord renting the apartment with, say, an extra $200 per month? Will you bribe the current resident of the apartment with $2,000 to vacate and give it to you all the time claiming to the landlord that they haven't left?

2. Are you willing to live in a slum? Landlords don't improve properties when they can't charge more for those improvements. Unsanitary conditions? Screw you! They can rent it to plenty of other people willing to live in that squalor. Properties just deteriorate until they are uninhabitable (or barely habitable) and it removes more properties from the market. With tenancy at will, landlords are able to evict anyone without reason with 30 days notice. Should you complain, you're out and unlikely to find another place.

3. Will you even be able to find a place? No one is willing to move because they won't be able to find another place. People hang on for dear life.

Price caps create shortages. The remaining people get to fight like shoppers at a Best Buy at Christmas for one of those Nintendo Wiis.

The first thing to go is anyone renting a room in their house because, for the limited rent they could get, they could use it better for themselves as a guest room or something. Next is anything that can be converted to condos. Remaining rental places are kept abysmally and many eventually become uninhabitable. Any little brightness in this situation is hoarded by a lucky few who tend to be those with political or economic power (doctors, lawyers, mayors, and judges) and you can't even pry those places from their cold dead hands.

Economics finds an interesting balance a lot of the time. If you force landlords to rent for pennies, they don't maintain their property until it's in a state that wouldn't command more than pennies in rent. If you are forcing tenants to not pay more than $x in rent per month, they'll give under the table for anyplace that's nice.

The easiest way to drive down housing prices is to increase the amount of housing. Landlords don't want vacancies and lower their prices to fill. The problem is that, in some cities, there are more people who want to live in them than there are housing units available. So, prices rise until some of those people decide they'd rather spend less and live in a less desirable area.

Other than price, what else should determine who gets in and who doesn't?