Why are we still fighting over whether rent control actually helps renters?

I had a landlord in Vancouver tell me last year that rent control was the reason he stopped fixing leaky pipes, because he couldn't raise rents enough to cover repairs. But then a tenant advocate showed me a study from Toronto that said it kept 300 families housed during the pandemic. So who's right here, or is it just different for every building?

2 comments

2 Comments

mary_wells1d ago

Real talk though, are we sure this is really that big of a deal? I mean, yeah, the Toronto study sounds nice and all, but my buddy in San Francisco has a similar leaky pipe story except his landlord just stopped doing any maintenance at all and then sold the building to some developer. So the 300 families housed during the pandemic, okay, but how many got displaced later when the whole building got flipped? I feel like we're arguing about a bandaid on a broken leg here, not actually fixing the housing market.

brookep271d ago

Mary, the "bandaid on a broken leg" thing is exactly what I keep coming back to. My cousin lives in Portland and she had a similar thing where her landlord patched a roof leak with duct tape and a trash bag, then three months later the whole ceiling caved in during a storm. It's like they're just kicking the can down the road until someone else has to pay for it. I get what you're saying about the Toronto study being a drop in the bucket, but sometimes a drop feels like a lot when you're the one drowning, you know? Still, you're right that until we stop letting developers flip buildings and push people out, we're just playing whack-a-mole with housing problems.