Rent control: boon or bust?

Re “June ballot item would phase out rent control,” Jan. 29

As compelling a story as it makes to show elderly folks in a mobile home park who would face higher rents, we need to look at the big picture. Rent control does not work. It makes existing housing more expensive, penalizes new renters with higher-than-normal rents, suppresses new low-income construction and forces landlords to make annual increases (or they lose the right to do so later). The biggest fallacy of rent control, however, is that even if it could work, there are not enough individual owners to make that happen. Rent control forces individual owners to do for society something society refuses to do for itself, which is simply not fair.

Morgan McBain

Venice

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It seems that a select few developers and owners stand to make a lot of money if they can get the rent control laws removed. They are so desperate in their greed that they have to claim it has something to do with eminent domain. When is enough going to be enough? Will the federal government step in when the slumlords raise the rent 300%, like a sub-prime balloon mortgage?

Eric G Tilley

Valley Village