The Flaws of Rent Ceilings
Cato Podcast
Cato Institute
4.5 • 979 Ratings
🗓️ 26 March 2026
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Massachusetts is weighing a ballot initiative that would cap rent increases at the rate of inflation with no vacancy decontrol, one of the most stringent rent control regimes proposed in the country. Cato's Ryan Bourne and Jeff Miron walk through why economists are nearly unanimous in opposing rent control: it shrinks rental supply, degrades housing quality, and tends to benefit longer-term, higher-income tenants rather than the low-income renters it claims to help. As Cambridge's own history shows, the policy doesn't just fail to solve the affordability problem; it actively makes it worse.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Cato podcast. I'm Ryan Bourne, Cato's R. Evan Sharf Chair for the public understanding of economics. |
| 0:14.0 | Rank control is one of those bad policy ideas that never seems to fully disappear. |
| 0:19.0 | Every time housing affordability gets worse, |
| 0:21.6 | it comes roaring back as a supposedly obvious fix. If rents are too high or increasing too quickly, |
| 0:27.6 | why not just make them lower by government decree? After the highest inflation since 1981, |
| 0:32.6 | policymakers and much of the public are scrambling for solutions that appear to promise lower living costs. And in Massachusetts, a potential ballot initiative threatens a particularly |
| 0:42.5 | stringent form of rent control for a state that right now currently bans rent control for most |
| 0:47.7 | private sector housing. To discuss this idea and the economics of rent control in general, I'm joined |
| 0:52.7 | today by Jeff Myron, |
| 0:58.6 | Vice President for Research at Cato and Senior Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Economics at Harvard University. |
| 1:01.3 | Jeff, welcome back to the Cato Podcast. |
| 1:02.7 | Great to be here. Nice to see you. |
| 1:05.8 | Great for you to be with us. If I remember correctly, you played a bit of a role in helping to make the case |
| 1:12.0 | for getting rid of rent control in Massachusetts in the 90s. So why don't you tell us a bit about |
| 1:16.9 | that? Yes. I at the time was a professor of economics at Boston University, and I was asked to |
| 1:22.9 | work as a consultant and write a report about the economics of rent control by something that was known as the small property owners of Cambridge. |
| 1:32.9 | These were typically people who would own these two to three family, two to these three story buildings that would have, say, the owner living on the first floor and then renters on the second and third floors. |
| 1:42.9 | So I wrote that report. |
| 1:44.5 | I did a little testimony in front of the state legislature when that became relevant. |
| 1:49.7 | And that report was cited by the critics of rent control, the people who are trying to repeal it |
| 1:56.0 | as part of their efforts. |
| 1:58.4 | So you stay around giving policy advice for long enough, the old debates resurfaced. |
... |
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