Bills such as were passed in Connecticut this weekend that put regulations on rental properties and require cities to prepare affordable housing plans usher in dangerous rent control programs that are devastating to cities, Judge Glock, director of research at the Manhattan Institute think tank, told Newsmax Sunday.
“There’s a famous quote from an economist who said rent control appears to be the most efficient way to destroy a city, except for bombing,” Glock told Newsmax’s “Wake Up America Weekend.” “We’ve really seen this story play out over and over again, and it’s quite depressing that some cities and now states think it’s a good idea to try to run the playbook back and see what happens.”
Members of Connecticut’s legislature Saturday voted in changes to a major housing law and sent the bill to the governor’s desk, reports The Hartford Courant. The bill aims to cut rent prices, increase housing supply, and encourage the use of public transit.
But Glock told Newsmax that when New York imposed stringent rent control measures in the 1970s, the results were abandoned buildings and even more expensive rents.
“It’s not a coincidence that the cities and states with rent control right now are also the cities and states with the most expensive rent, New York, California, Oregon, and so forth,” said Glock.
“Study after study proves that in the non-rent control apartments, rent goes way up,” he added. “People stop moving around, and in rent-controlled apartments, the quality goes down. Landlords stop maintaining them and eventually, if it’s strict enough, they abandon them. It’s a tragedy.”
Meanwhile, such measures are becoming more common, he said.
“Unfortunately, a lot of economists just a few years ago thought that rent control was one of those ideas that would kind of end up on the ash heap of history, [because] it has been so thoroughly discredited that new cities and states wouldn’t try to impose it, or at least make it more onerous,” he said.
But now, anti-landlord laws are being passed increasingly, including rent-control statutes, said Glock.
“It used to be a bipartisan consensus that this was a bad idea,” he said. “President Obama’s former chief economist said that rent control was the most disgraced idea in the economic toolkit, and we know that taking away property from people can have real consequences.”
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