America needs more housing, not rent control
The Jan. 6 opinion article “Rent control is inflation control, and Atlanta is ground zero” rested on failed logic and faulty solutions.
Capping rents, as the authors suggested, might sound good, but a national rent control law would make housing less affordable and less desirable. Reducing the incentive to invest by cutting profit margins would decrease the quality and supply of rental housing. Rent control would discourage new construction and encourage the conversion of existing rental properties to other uses. Cities like Austin and Minneapolis prove that when housing supply goes up, rents go down.
Ironically, the essay’s authors also accused a property management software provider called RealPage of controlling rent prices while asking the government to do the same. They’re wrong on both fronts. A software company used to suggest prices for roughly 7% of rentals nationwide, according to the company, is unlikely to wield significant price-setting power. Its recommendations reflect market conditions. As for government rent control, it’s been a failure everywhere it’s been tried. With a shortage of 5 million homes, America needs more housing, not a national rent-control experiment.
The housing affordability crisis requires serious solutions, such as removing an array of onerous construction regulations so developers can build more single- and multifamily housing. The solution to the housing crisis is less government intervention, not more.
ADAM A. MILLSAP, Baltimore
LECTURER IN APPLIED ECONOMICS PROGRAM, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
Amid crisis, Trump was an embarrassment
President-elect Donald Trump’s response to the Jan. 1 attack in New Orleans was shockingly awful and alarming.
A terrorist attack left 14 people dead and dozens more injured. What was the president-elect’s response? First, he repeated misinformation from Fox News that the perpetrator had crossed the border illegally rather than being a U.S. citizen from Texas. Even when this was proved false, he kept repeating it. Then, in a Truth Social rant, he said the most scurrilous things about the state of the country, President Joe Biden and government workers.
You cannot just pass this off as Trump being Trump. In a crisis, not only could he not be counted on to be truthful or compassionate, but he also chose to use language as ugly and divisive as possible. Trump is without a sense of appropriate behavior and fails to meet any standard of good leadership or even common decency. He is an embarrassment.
SUSAN LAUTENBACHER, DUNWOODY
