Rent Control is Having a Moment
This piece originally appeared on Fran Quigley’s blog Housing Is A Human Right on November 21, 2025.
Rent control is having a moment.
Zohran Mamdani’s historic win in the New York City mayoral race was fueled by an unrelenting emphasis on affordability, especially on housing, which is the highest cost for most households. Back in October, 2024, the then-little-known Mamdani’s campaign gained huge momentum when he became the first mayoral candidate to commit to a rent freeze.
Now, “affordability” is such a powerful frame that even Donald Trump is echoing it, no matter how imperfect a fit with his emphasis on tax cuts for the wealthy.
From our eviction court clients’ perspective, we can attest that rent control can make a big impact. Three of every four households eligible for rental assistance do not receive it due to severe underfunding of those life-changing programs. As we have written here, that needs to change, and it can.
But in the meantime, the only protection those 75% of low-income families have is controlling the for-profit cost of the roof over their heads.
Enter rent control. Simply put, rent control is government-imposed limitations on the amount landlords can charge for rent.
Rent control protects tenants from price-gouging while also guaranteeing landlords a fair return on their investment. Almost all current rent control programs allow for regular rent increases, often in amounts that exceed inflation.
Capping rent costs is hugely popular, with 82% of the U.S. public supporting rent control.
Even so, rent control has long been demonized by landlords and economists, many of the latter funded by . . . landlords.
But, as we have written in detailed arguments for rent control on this site and in Lessons From Eviction Court, the research shows that rent control, the law of the land in nearly 200 cities, is deeply effective at controlling costs. Families stay housed, neighborhoods are stabilized, children stay in the same schools. By contrast, there is no convincing evidence that rent control reduces housing supply.
This week, economists Neale Mahoney and Bharat Ramamurti praised Mamdani’s plans in the New York Times. While “it may terrify many economists,” they wrote, the time is right for price controls:
Sharply rising rents and utility bills wreak havoc on family budgets. That’s why there is a case for temporary, targeted price controls that hold down costs, paired with supply-side reforms that encourage new production.
The claim that economists are “terrified” of rent control is getting a bit dated. Many economists besides Mahoney and Ramamurti have grown to support it, agreeing with Rutgers University professor Mark Paul and others that the data show rent control is effective.
The growing support for rent control follows the pattern of the consensus on the minimum wage. The longtime Econ 101 argument that rising wages would reduce employment was proven to be untrue by Nobel Laureate economist David Card and others. Now, support for increased minimum wages is widespread, even among economists.
Rent control is having a moment, in New York City and well beyond. Let’s hope it endures.
