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Rent Control Is the American Way
Taking care of each other is a part of the American way. Politicians doing the right thing on the behalf of vulnerable tenants is also a part of the American way.
Feb 01, 2026
The real estate industry doesn’t want you to know an important fact about rent control: Since World War I, rent regulations have protected poor and middle- and working-class tenants against skyrocketing rents and predatory landlords. Rent control, in other words, has long been a part of the American way.
Soon after World War I, elected officials understood that they needed to protect tenants against sky-high rents due to a worsening housing shortage. Fair rent committees, with an emphasis on “fair,” were set up in 153 cities in the United States, and those committees routinely reached out to landlords to stop unreasonable rent hikes. In Washington D.C. and Denver, rent commissions determined fair rents, and, in New York, state legislators passed emergency laws to control sky-high rising rents.
Politicians knew that they couldn’t allow the status quo of unfair rents to continue, and they knew that they had the power to do something about it. So they stepped in to help hard-working Americans.
During World War II, politicians again did the right thing and expanded rent control. The federal government established rent control for around 80 percent of rental housing in the U.S. in response to housing shortages and rent gouging. When that federal program was phased out, some states, such as New York and New Jersey, established their own rent control policies in the early 1950s.
If there was ever time for politicians to protect tenants, now is that time, and the situation is dire.
Throughout this period, elected officials understood that tenants needed stable, affordable housing that would not force renters to choose between eating or paying the rent or paying medical bills or paying the rent. Americans’ well-being was at stake.
Fast forward to the early 1970s. With worsening inflation, rents spiked. President Richard Nixon pushed for temporary rent controls, and that was followed by American cities passing rent regulations, including Berkeley, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
Unfortunately, in the 1980s and 1990s, the deep-pocketed real estate industry pushed back, aggressively lobbying state legislatures across the country to pass rent control bans or restrictions. Landlords and lobbyists went against the American way of looking out for people.
Today, more than 35 states have laws that stop the expansion of rent control while the real estate industry’s profits, through unfair, excessive rents, go through the roof. Between 2010 and 2019, renters paid a staggering $4.5 trillion to landlords in the U.S, according to Zillow.
Recently, Big Tech and Big Real Estate teamed up to charge wildly inflated rents through a rent-fixing software program by RealPage, which brought about numerous lawsuits and investigations. The software allowed corporate landlords to collude and charge outrageous rents that harmed Americans throughout the nation.
If there was ever time for politicians to protect tenants, now is that time, and the situation is dire. Eviction Lab, the prestigious research institute at Princeton University, found that increasingly unaffordable rents are linked to higher mortality rates. And a wide-ranging study on homelessness by the University of California San Francisco revealed that people ended up living on the streets because of sky-high rents. An urgent way to address these life-threatening problems is to utilize rent control—an American tradition since World War I.
But activists believe that rent control isn’t the only tool to fix the housing affordability and homelessness crises. There needs to be a multi-pronged approach called the “3 Ps”: protect tenants through rent control and other renter protections; preserve existing affordable housing, not demolish it to make way for unaffordable luxury housing; and produce new affordable and homeless housing.
Taking care of each other is a part of the American way. Politicians doing the right thing on the behalf of vulnerable tenants is also a part of the American way. Today’s elected officials must continue that work, especially since tenants throughout the country are facing serious risks of death and homelessness. They must immediately utilize rent regulations and the 3 Ps.
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Despite Vows on ‘Affordability,’ Trump Proclaims: ‘I Want to Drive Housing Prices Up’
We're not to going create conditions, said the billionaire president who inherited his wealth, "so that somebody that didn't work very hard can buy a home."
Jan 29, 2026
President Donald Trump in recent weeks has vowed to make living in the US more affordable, as polls have consistently shown voters are giving him low marks on both his handling of the economy and inflation.
However, Trump undercut this pledge during a Cabinet meeting on Thursday in which he said he wanted—despite a nationwide housing crisis—to actively make housing even more expensive than it is today.
"Existing housing, people that own their home, we're going to keep them wealthy, we're going to keep those prices up," Trump said. "We're not going to destroy the value of their homes so that somebody that didn't work very hard can buy a home."
Trump: I don’t want to drive housing prices down. I want to drive housing prices up for people who own their homes. You can be sure that will happen pic.twitter.com/9BupkUmXss
— Acyn (@Acyn) January 29, 2026
Trump added that his administration wanted to "make it easier to buy" a house by lowering interest rates, but then reiterated that he wanted to make houses themselves more expensive.
"There's so much talk of, 'Oh, we're going to drive housing prices down,'" Trump said. "I don't want to drive housing prices down, I want to drive housing prices up for people that own their homes. And they can be assured that's what's going to happen."
The implications of the president's remarks were obvious to those concerned about the nation's affordable housing crisis and the struggle of working people trying to get by.
As Melanie D'Arrigo, executive director for the Campaign for New York Health, put it: "54% of Americans struggle to afford housing, and over 770,000 Americans are homeless—and Trump doesn't think those numbers are high enough."
A Fox News poll released on Wednesday found that 54% of Americans think the US is worse off now than it was a year ago, while just 31% say the country is in better shape. Just 25% of voters surveyed said they are better off now than they were a year ago, and more than 40% said that Trump's economic policies have personally hurt them.
Given Trump's already low numbers on economic performance, many observers were quick to ridicule him for his pledge to make existing houses less affordable for prospective buyers.
"Hello Donald this is your political strategist speaking," George Pearkes, global macro strategist for Bespoke Investment Group, sarcastically wrote. "I am advising you today to please keep saying this stuff."
Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández (D-N.M.) argued that Trump's views on housing prices put him well out of touch with most US voters.
"Trump only sees the world as a rich developer," she wrote in a social media post. "He has never, and will never, care about creating affordable homeownership for working and middle class Americans."
Vox writer Eric Levitz posted a not-so-subtle dig at Trump for straying so easily off message.
https://t.co/qnR9wJiaBX pic.twitter.com/zrafC50Bea
— Eric Levitz (@EricLevitz) January 29, 2026
Polling analyst G. Elliott Morris, meanwhile, said that Trump's inability to stay on message was entirely predictable given his notorious unpredictability.
"Trump launched an affordability-focused midterm campaign for Republicans this week, traveling to Iowa to give a speech about how good his presidency has been for the cost of living," he wrote. "That's going about as well as you'd think. Here POTUS is saying he is going to keep housing prices high."
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Pedal to the Metal on California's Billionaire Tax
I have no problem with hitting billionaires with a much higher tax bill than they now face. The deeper issue is how to prevent the creation of billionaires in the first place.
Jan 28, 2026
A coalition of unions and other progressive groups is trying to get an initiative on California’s ballot this fall which would impose a 5 percent tax on the wealth of the 200-250 billionaires living in the state. The tax would be retroactive, so it applies to billionaires who lived in the state as of January 1 of this year. The supporters estimate that it could raise $100 billion, almost 30 percent of the state’s annual budget, although the tax could be paid over five years.
Many people have asked me what I thought about the tax. I confess to originally being hesitant. I have no problem with hitting billionaires with a much higher tax bill than they now face. After all, they are the ones with the money.
The right likes to push the story that billionaires won’t have incentive to become ridiculously rich if we tax them more. I always found that absurd, but even taken seriously what would it mean? Will Elon Musk spend less money and effort bribing politicians to get government contracts and favorable regulatory treatment if we tax him too much?
But that aside, I do take seriously concerns about evasion and avoidance. Billionaires care a lot about their money, and they are prepared to go to great lengths to avoid having to surrender it to the government. There clearly is some point at which we get less tax revenue by raising rates, as a result of evasion and avoidance. And that point is lower at the state and local level than the national level, since it’s much easier for billionaires to move out of New York City or California than to leave the United States.
On this point, I was influenced by research by Joshua Rauh and Ryan Shyu showing that the state lost 60 percent of the revenue anticipated by California’s 2012 Proposition 30. This raised the marginal tax rate on people earning more than $1 million a year from 10.3 percent to 13.3 percent. This suggested to me that California was very close to this tipping point. (It got closer when Trump’s 2017 tax bill limited the deduction for state and local taxes on the federal taxes.)
Rauh works at the conservative Hoover Institute, so I naturally viewed the work with suspicion, but I could not see anything wrong with it. (If anyone can tell me where they messed up, I’m all ears.)
Anyhow, recognizing that avoidance and evasion are real, I have always been cautious about efforts to whack the rich with very large taxes. I am open to the California wealth tax because its structure seems to minimize this risk.
By making the date at which the wealth tax applies in the past, rich people cannot leave going forward. I was concerned about some billionaires fleeing when the tax was being discussed in the fall, and it seems some did, but at this point that’s water under the bridge.
To be clear, I’m absolutely certain that many of the people facing the tax will do everything they can to try to escape the tax, starting with defeating the initiative, and then tying it up in the courts as long as they can. With the ultimate decision likely to rest with the Republican Supreme Court, I’m not at all confident that the state will see the money, but we can’t preemptively surrender. At this point it seems worth going full speed ahead with the initiative.
The Longer Term: Let’s Not Have Billionaires
My bigger complaint with the effort to tax back some of the billionaires’ billions is that we should be more focused on not letting them be billionaires in the first place. There is an incredibly lazy view that we just have a market sitting there, which generates inequality, and then we need the government to step in to redistribute income.
More than a decade ago, Elizabeth Warren, who I greatly admire, did a viral video that was dubbed “you didn’t build that.” The gist of it was that the success of rich people depended on a social and physical infrastructure that was paid for by the whole of society, not just the hard work and ingenuity of the person who happened to get rich.
This is very true. To be profitable, a factory needs the roads and ports to bring their materials in and ship their finished product out. It also needs a skilled workforce to be both on the factory flaw and to handle business operations. No one can get rich by themselves.
Elizabeth Warren Doesn’t Go Far Enough
But this is only part of the story. In addition to the physical and social infrastructure, we have a massive set of rules that determine who gets to keep the goodies. I keep harping on government-granted patent and copyright monopolies, both because there is a huge amount of money at stake (easily over $1 trillion a year or $8k per household) and because they so obviously could be different.
We can make these monopolies shorter and weaker, allowing their holders to profit much less from them. Also, we can rely more on alternative mechanisms, like direct public funding of research, as we do currently with more than $50 billion a year in biomedical research at the National Institutes of Health. Many of today’s yacht-loving billionaires would still be working for a living with different rules on intellectual property.
Labor law is another obvious case where governments set the rules, and they could be structured in a way far more beneficial to workers. In the early post-World War II era it was widely recognized that large corporations with monopolistic power dominated the economy, but that was not necessarily seen as a bad thing, because their workers also benefited from higher wages. This was due to the fact that they were unionized and able to demand their share of the benefits from monopolistic power.
This is much less the case today because unions are far weaker. But that is not a natural outcome, the rules on labor-management relations were written to make workers weaker. There is no natural market in this story, the government writes the rules to make them more beneficial to one side or the other.
Just to give a few examples: the prohibition on secondary boycotts in the US is a regulation that unambiguously weakens unions. A secondary boycott would mean Elon Musk’s suppliers could be struck over sending him steel, if he didn’t give the auto workers at Tesla a big pay hike.
The ban on union shops (“right-to-work”) in most states, where all the workers who benefit from a union pay their share of the union’s costs, is a government intervention against freedom of contract. This also weakens workers. Restrictions or outright bans on collective bargaining by gig workers is another example. In addition, there could be serious penalties for violating labor laws, as in millions of dollars in fines from real courts, rather than joke sanctions from the National Labor Relations Board.
None of this is “the market.” This is a story of government policy designed to give more money to the oligarchs.
The list goes on. Mark Zuckerberg, and now Larry Ellison, would be much poorer without Section 230, which protects their massive social media platforms from the same sort of liability for spreading lies that print and broadcast media face. Different bankruptcy laws that made private equity firms liable for the debts of the companies they take over and then push into bankruptcy would likely have prevented many of today’s billionaires, as would applying a sales tax on financial transactions similar to the sales tax people pay when they buy clothes or shoes.
This is the topic of my now dated book Rigged (it’s free). The point is that the market is infinitely malleable. We can structure it in a way that leads to far more equality or in ways that gives all the money to billionaires, as we have done in the last half century.
In that context, by all means we should try to find creative ways to tax back some of the wealth we have allowed them to accumulate, but it makes much sense, and it’s much more efficient, not to structure the market in a way that gives them all the money in the first place.
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