Out of control
12th February 2009
Megan McArdle is nonplussed.
New York City’s main industry lies in ruins; its finances are in peril; its housing market is falling. What does the city need? That’s right, tougher rent controls!
In times like this, it’s easy to believe that if you laid all the economists in the world end to end, they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion. But here’s one of the things that basically everyone, left to right, agrees on: rent control is the surest way to destroy a city’s housing stock short of aerial bombing, and one of the major culprits behind New York’s painfully low vacancy rate.