What Rent Control Actually Costs A Housing Market

Rent control in the U.S. comes in two flavors: capping rent growth for market-rate units and keeping designated units at below-market rates. Both of these rent restrictions are controversial. Some cities like Minneapolis and Los Angeles recently adopted or expanded their rent control programs while many states, like Montana, Florida and Ohio, preemptively banned rent control. More than 300 cities and a handful of states have rent control policies in place as of 2026.

Rent control is controversial in part because research has shown positive, neutral and negative impacts from these policies. Importantly, most of the research has been constrained to individual MSAs and the idiosyncratic form of rent control in those cities. Depending on the specific outcome the research tested for, often-narrow findings were generalized into policy success or failure.

But now we know better. For the first time, researchers broadly examined different variants of rent control and measured the effect on total housing supply across different markets, finding that “rent control is associated with a 10.4% reduction in total number of units in a city.” ¹