Rent Control Explained: Debunking Your Landlord's Myths

The fact that 3% rent increase is too low but a 3% raise for a wage is considered a good raise explains so much.

Crazy how we live in a country where your landlord can decide to raise your rent by a couple hundred dollars while you barely get a raise from your employer, which is just a couple of dollars.

If the city can cap rents, then the county should cap property tax.

In 10 years, my rent has increased from $700 per month to $1700 for the same apartment, same appliances, and same everything. That's about 10% per year in rent increases with no value added.

Abolish renting for big corporations. Incentivize individual ownership. Cap individual landlords to own and rent so many properties.

As a St. Paul resident, my landlord was only able to raise my rent by $30 June 1st thanks to the new legislation. Them being able to raise rent by whatever price they want would be impossible for people to afford staying due to wages being stagnant..

This is the on the ground reporting the mainstream absolutely neglects. What a valuable channel, thank you for all you do.

This video uses terms interchangeably that don't mean the same thing. "Rent Control" and "Rent Stabilization" are not the same thing. The bill passed, the first of its kind as the video states, is "rent stabilization" -- it limits the rate of rent increase. Landlords are STILL allowed to raise rents, just not by a certain amount. "Rent Control" is when a hard limit is placed on the price of rent, above which landlords are not allowed to raise rent. The broad consensus among economists is that rent control stifles supply within rent-controlled localities. You could make the argument "actually, there's nothing about rent control that prevents landlords and developers from building new housing!" and you'd be technically correct. It's true, developers won't stop building housing... they'll just build the housing somewhere outside the rent-controlled city, i.e., the suburbs and exurbs. This means housing is pushed further and further away from places of work and existing neighborhoods. This means housing sprawls and sprawls and more families are forced into car dependency in order to get to work. This video lumps both "rent control" and "rent stabilization" together under the umbrella term "rent regulation", then proceeds to say that everything bad said about "rent control" is false because "rent regulations" are shown to keep people in their homes. You see the verbal gymnastics going on here? Watch the video again and note how the narrator hops between these three terms without defining each separately. The video also uses "St. Paul", "Minneapolis", and "The Twin Cities" interchangeably, even though the rent stabilization in question only applies to St. Paul, not to Minneapolis. They're two adjacent but separate cities. While hopping back-and-forth between talking about St. Paul and Minneapolis, the video glosses over the fact that the rent stabilization was next to useless at 9:20 because the raise cap was 3% but without rent control rent would not have gone up by that much anyway. The most egregious omission in this video is the fact that Minneapolis (remember, the city opposite of rent-stabilized St. Paul) has seen RENT GO DOWN by hundreds of dollars this year. There's no mention about how five years ago Minneapolis (not St. Paul) abolished single-family zoning. and have been building thousands and thousands of units each of the last 5 years, making Minneapolis the only city in the country where market rate rent is going down WITHOUT RENT CONTROL. In a video about preventing displacement from gentrification, why was there no mention of this????? I wanted to like this video -- all the families and activists seem like genuine people who worked really hard for their city. Even though I don't like rent control, I do like rent stabilization, so I can appreciate the work the activists were doing. And the production quality of the video was great. But sadly, I'm giving it a dislike because of the terrible writing. I dislike this video because people are probably going to watch it and come away more ignorant and misinformed than they were before watching this video.

Where’s the debunk? St Paul’s development has indeed decreased. Stopping ‘gentrification’ means these places fall into disrepair.

2:58 Rent Control is a Price Ceiling, not a Price Floor.

Landlord: If I can't raise your rent by it more than 3% of a year then I won't be able to reinvest in fixing up the place and making it better The place: hasn't had the landlord do any of the things that they were supposed to, person pays out of pocket to fix it themselves

This video relied heavily on the study conducted by the college of Minneapolis & St. Paul. 1. It is a weak argument to say that because you observed on average about 2-5% yearly rent increase from 2000- now that rent control set at 3% is not likely to reduce Landlord's profits by much. Why a sample size of only 20 years? Does that factor in the increased cost of development, or the crazy amount of inflation since 2020? 2. The claim that rent stabilization will not affect rhe rate of new development. The study looked at cities that exempted new construction from rent stabilization, and said this bill by Minneapolis is the first of its kind. 3. The idea that landlords want profit = evil, or Landlords price their units higher than the local population can afford= evil. Literally the community activists all chararcterize landlords wanting to raise prices higher than 3%, or that are against this measure as "predatory". Any warnings of actions landlords and property developers may take is are framed as "threats". 4. Gentrification. Saying that the city reinvesting in newer construction, and trying to attract higher income residents is racist, or clasist. This video specifically cites construction of the US highway system and how that displaced a lot of black people. The city needs net tax payers, and can not function of of dreams and socialism. Richer residents moving to Suburbs kind of left a vaccuum. Overall, this is a policy doomed to fail. This is like trying to hold onto a handful of dry sand: the harder you clench your fist, the faster sand escapes until your hand is empty. New York commercial, and residential is an absolute dumpster fire of inflated prices and poor quality. The community organizers in this video may have won the battle temporarily, but in less than 15 years, most of the poorer residents in the city will have to move away anyways because of the economic reality of trying to live by yourself in the city nowadays. Want to avoid being priced out of a home? Form strong bonds with your friends and family, and don't become overly attached to living in the same area code for the rest of your life. Notice how often the anecdotal examples of beneficiaries of rent control are single mothers/ single-income individuals? Notice how this think piece completely ignores what happens after higher-income residents move into the gentrified city? ( the gentrified portion is better to live in than the surrounding non-gentrified portion) No matter your politics, or religious beliefs, strong, in-person human connections are needed now more than ever. A lot of young adults want to move out of their parent's house at 18, and make it on their own in the big city. A lot of people in poorer communities are afraid to explore what life has to offer outside of city living. 4 or 5 generations may have rented in the same place forever. Maybe it's time for a lot of lower-income city dwellers to seriously consider a new lifestyle, and try to build a community where they could actually own their property eventually? Ever heard of homesteading, or living out of a trailer? Displacement does not equal death. Landlords losing profit does not equal death either, but eroding the limitations slowly, over time of how the government can influence the economy will have widereaching, unpredictable consequences. In the case of an individual being displaced, individual community members could easily help them out. In the case ofthe government gambling in the economy, once the city's money runs out if the State government does not bail them out, then everyone gets displaced anyways. When those "greedy, rich people" are no longer able to provide the services, noone wins. Fight for rent control. Get mad at how corporations manipulate housing prices. Do whatever you want. All I know is it is not saving those Black communities, and you are foolish if you are a single-income person who insists on living in a city where you are a few, bad economic decisions away from being homeless. If you need everyone else to fund your economic decisions and cushion the economic consequences for you to maintain your situation, then are you not forcing your decisions on everyone else in a way? Is it not in everyone else's self interest to look out for themselves and ignore your needs at that point? Since this conversation already devolved into "fuck those landlords; they're greedy, and we need the government to hold them accountable" why should landlords care if poorer residents don't have homes? that goodwill will not erase the economic conditions leading to the price increases. Their concerns are ignored anyways because there will always be more poor people than rich people in any population.They will be outvoted, and have to take individual action because "Minority Rights" are no longer prioritized in the US government.

I was looking for something that was a strong argument FOR rent control / stabilization. However this WAS NOT it. While the personal stories are important, they do not address the economic arguments around RC/RS. If someone has a life event that causes financial hardship, there should be social programs that steps in, but that should NOT be addressed by RC/RS. RC/RS does cause a shrinking of the rental pool, and a lowering of rental property quality. There are several proven economic factors for that, and too many examples in the US to support this. There is nothing in this video to viably support a counter argument. The reason that RC/RS tends to get interest and bills are passed is because of these kinds of social stories, but not economic reality. More people understand the former rather than the later, and people = votes. So far I have only heard of ONE example where RC/RS worked. That is in Austria, but technically this wasn't RC/RS that worked. RC/RS was used as a vehicle for the city of Vienna to buy up properties from former landlords after poisoning the rental market. Once they crashed the rental market with RC/RS, they were able to step in. The city effectively became a socially motivated monopoly landlord, and sets rents based on a balance of overall need, and induvial circumstance. It is the only example where property quality did not decline, because the city itself guaranteed it's maintenance in a zero-profit model. I would be interested if anyone has another positive example. The "Vienna" model is unlikely to get any traction in the US since it requires both a very strong socialist mentality, and a city with a lot of money to buy the properties. As far as I know neither of those exist here. I believe the closest we could hope to get in the US would be a significant expansion of well-targeted Section8 vouchers, or a local property tax increase that was then directed to building city-owned housing for those with low means, and/or high needs. Since these really do target the REAL problem which is the supply of housing. RC/RS has shown many times that is does the exact opposite and reduces that supply.

My rent just increased by $348—- per month due to market value. What do I receive?????? NOTHING.

I know properties all over the city I live in that will ask for 2000+ USD per month for a one bedroom, one kitchen flat that haven't had a tenant in a decade or more. I know folks that were willing to pay these extortion prices for a flat, where the landlord mysteriously went silent or suddenly found another tenant when they mentioned the partner that will be living with them is either of the same gender, is transgender, or goes by a non-binary pronoun. Landlords are parasites on society that will lie through their teeth if it means they can raise their profits or keeping a minority group from their properties.

Love that excuse. If you put a cap on rent then landlords can't afford to renovate. Anyone who's lived in a cheap apt. knows that they don't renovate in cities where there are no caps anyways!

There is rent control, then there should be price control for at least hydro, water, gas, property tax and interest rates.

The very short clip in this video is very true about burning down rent controlled apartment buildings. I am from NY and saw this with my own eyes. The landlord's would burn the buildings and collect the insurance money because they could not raise the rent. This was an epidemic back in the 1970s and the 1980s. The buildings are all old decrepit falling apart and in dire need of repair and the landlords did not have the money to fix them.

lmao I love that she's showing how high rents are a problem meanwhile Rent Control is causing the high rents.

Y’all know rent control fucks over renters that don’t benefit from rent control. Landlords jack up the price to new tenants to price in future rent increase caps.