Of Course the Rent is 'Too Damn High'. Government Made Sure of It.

I don’t think there is any stranger cycle in politics than this.

Government creates a problem—or takes an existing problem and makes it worse. Then, when the damage becomes impossible to ignore, government is expected to fix it.

Its solution is almost always more of what caused the problem: more rules, more control, more government.

The hard lesson people refuse to learn is that government rarely fixes anything. It turns one problem into three. Then it turns those three problems into nine as the cycle repeats.

That’s what cities like New York are experiencing: decades of government intervention compounded until public anger finally boils over—just not toward the people responsible.

When rent gets too high, landlords take all the blame. Politicians walk away as if they merely discovered the crime scene rather than helped create it.

But step back and look at what they’ve done.

Rents rising faster than inflation isn’t surprising.

It’s the expected result.

Imagine you’re a landlord and the government bans credit and income checks.

You can no longer determine how likely someone is to pay, so what do you do? You price that additional risk into everyone’s rent.

Make eviction nearly impossible?

The government has moved paying rent closer to being optional. You build the expected losses into the rent paid by everyone else.

Require expensive renovations while limiting what you can charge afterward?

You leave some units empty because renovating and renting them would lose money.

Freeze or cap rents?

Eventually, the costs and aggravation may outweigh whatever you’re allowed to collect. Once again, the apartment stays empty.

Government can outlaw a price—apparently that’s now considered a legitimate power.

But it cannot outlaw math.

The costs and risks don’t disappear. They reappear as higher starting rents, larger upfront payments, stricter lease terms, deteriorating buildings and fewer available apartments.

That is how a city desperate for housing ends up with tens of thousands of “ghost apartments”—units that exist but aren’t available to rent.

Argentina recently ran the same experiment in reverse. Javier Milei repealed the country’s restrictive rental law. Landlords returned to the market, Buenos Aires rental supply surged by more than 170 percent and inflation-adjusted rents fell.

Government had spent years trying to make apartments affordable by making them scarce.

Milei made them worth renting again.

The market took care of the rest.