Thomas Sowell has a new column with a mention of rent control: "New York is the city with the oldest and strongest rent control laws in the nation. San Francisco is second. But if you look at cities with the highest average rents, New York is first and San Francisco is second. Obviously, 'rent control' laws do not control rent."
And Harvard economics professor Greg Mankiw has a fascinating post about " an ingenious scheme used by some universities in New York, where much rental housing is rent controlled." As he sums it up, "In the end, the goal of the rent control laws is thwarted (the low rents are enjoyed by well-paid tenured faculty rather than the needy), the income tax laws are thwarted (a sizable part of compensation is untaxed), and all this is done by a nonprofit institution (the university) whose ostensible purpose is to serve the public interest."
Professor Mankiw's post is great as far as it goes, but perhaps New York's "newspaper war" will mean we'll soon get a news article that actually names the universities doing this and the tenured professors who are occupying the rent-controlled apartments, and that asks the professors and the universities to justify the practice.
