In this study, Dr. Charles Baird addresses the rent control boom currently underway in the United States. Beginning with the fundamentals of supply and demand for housing, Baird expands his analysis to include questions of equity, housing availability, and special interest manipulation of regulatory statutes. He shows that high housing costs do not occur in a vacuum but are related to many other governmental policies including zoning, housing codes, and environmental issues.

First Published in 1987, Rent Control discusses the economics of rent control, citing numerous international examples of the detrimental effects of rigid rent control. Various policy options to revamp rental housing markets are examined critically. Rent control has proved a key issue in both politics and economics, repeatedly dividing interventionists and free marketeers. Consequently, its history - throughout the world- is extremely involved and tangled. Successive governments have sought to reverse the legislation of their predecessors without appearing, on the one hand, to remove the right to manage their own properties from landlords, or on the other to condone the behavior of unscrupulous and exploitative landlords. The authors argue that partial repeals of rent control have been ineffective at best, and counterproductive at worst. Only complete abolition of rent and eviction controls imposed by the state can bring about revitalised housing markets, and the book ends with a discussion of how this can be done without causing too much hardship. This is an interesting read for scholars and researchers of political economy and British economy

Rent control, the governmental regulation of the level of payment and tenure rights for rental housing, occupies a small but unique niche within the broad domain of public regulation of markets. The price of housing cannot be regulated by establishing a single price for a given level of quality, as other commodities such as electricity and sugar have been regulated at various times. Rent regulation requires that a price level be established for each individual housing unit, which in turn implies a level of complexity in structure and oversight that is unequaled.Housing provides a sense of security, defines our financial and emotional well-being, and influences our self-definition. Not surprisingly, attempts to regulate its price arouse intense controversy. Residential rent control is praised as a guarantor of affordable housing, excoriated as an indefensible distortion of the market, and both admired and feared as an attempt to transform the very meaning of housing access and ownership.This book provides a thorough assessment of the evolution of rent regulation in North American cities. Contributors sketch rent control's origins, legal status, economic impacts, political dynamics, and social meaning. Case studies of rent regulation in specific North American cities from New York and Washington, DC, to Berkeley and Toronto are also presented. This is an important primer for students, advocates, and practitioners of housing policy and provides essential insights on the intersection of government and markets.