This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, February 4th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

A President Bernie Sanders would work to establish a national policy of rent control.

The policy would be a disaster for tenants, landlords, housing stock, and would be builders of new housing.

Cato's Ryanborn explains.

Well, Bernie Sanders' specific rent control proposal

would in essence seek to limit the amount that landlords could raise rents year to year

by one and a half times the rate of inflation or 3% whichever is higher.

And that's an extremely restrictive price control in essence.

It would currently mean rent increases could only be around 3.5% per year and that's a much more restrictive control than we've seen

where rent control has been rolled out quite recently in California for

older buildings and in Oregon. In Oregon for example the rent increased caps of 7% plus

CPI inflation. So in essence what Sanders is trying to do here is really limit the increases in rents that

landlords can make in any given year. He's applying this extraordinarily broadly,

usually rent-control legislation at least has some carve-outs for newish buildings or

landlords wanting to do particular things in terms of improvements with the property.

There are some exemptions around that, but this is probably the most restrictive national

rent control plan that one could imagine. And I think the interesting thing is

it's predicated on the idea really that at the moment landlords can set rents

to whatever they want whenever they want.

Bernie Sanders doesn't appear to believe that rents are a price that reflect the supply and demand

of rentable accommodation in a market, he seems to think that high rents are

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