Rent control?? (apartments, for rent, to buy)

[Chowhound]

Wondered what people thought about rent control. In theory is sounds good, it helps lower income people out, not raising the rent to fast etc. I was thinking that if I owned property and the fair market value for rent was say 1600, it would probably t me off if the government said that I could only rent it to someone for say 1000. I'm not sure if it works that way or not though.

[katenik]

see the prop 98 thread.

[Christine Joan]

It doesn't exactly work that way. Only certain structures in certain cities are controlled by rent control. If a landowner does not want to participate in owning a rent control building, they can simply not buy one. There are plenty of apartment buildings available to buy that are not controlled by rent control. Moreover, even if someone or a company decides to purchase a building subject to rent control, whenever a tenant moves out of the building, the owner is free to reset the rent on that unit to the current market rate. As far as I know the city does not ever demand that an owner charge a set rate for any unit. However, after the tenant moves in, the owner is then restricted from raising rent more than 3 to 5 percent or whatever the current rate is for that city each year thereafter. Apartment owners who own property subject to rent control profit on their investments, just not as much as they could if they were allowed to raise rents witout limit.

The greater problem with rent controlled units is that the property owners sometimes do not take as good of care of their apartments that are subject to rent control as they do those that are not.