Are you serious? Rent control laws are awful, destroy the incentive to maintain housing stock or build new housing stock, and ultimately raise rents for everyone except the lucky few who can get rent controlled apartments.
Municipalities are just organs of the state, and state legislatures are entirely justified in preventing them from enacting myopic legislation.
Now I'm not such a big fan of municipal legislation - as a European, I think American democracy may be too decentralized and exacerbate the public choice problem, but I don't see a clear organizing principle that will only prevent economically bad legislation while allowing economically good legislation. The proposals to ban municipal or county internet services in North Carolina are just as mypopic as rent control laws in many Californian cities.
Operating utilities (especially last mile internet) at the municipal level makes much better sense than federalizing it. The transit market is sufficiently competitive that there is no need for the last mile operator to own a national network. Meanwhile with a national network operator, if the service is unusually terrible in a specific city there is nothing that city's residents can do about it because even when they're all in agreement they don't have enough votes to move the needle at the federal level.
And then you can have laboratories of democracy: If one city funds their network entirely through subscription fees and another funds it entirely through property taxes then maybe we discover that one works much better and other cities can start doing that.
The biggest fallacy I hear from people who don't live in one of these housing-crunched cities is the line.. everyone except the lucky few who can get rent controlled apartments. Rent control laws in SF, for example, are very inclusive. I mean, RC apartments can't be both rare AND pervasive enough to "destroy the incentive" to invest in housing, right? And every RC law I know of (which is only a few) has exemptions for new construction. In SF it's anything built after ~1980. In NYC I know it's back much further than that. So it doesn't do anything specifically to depress new construction.
Fundamentally, the question is do tenants have rights or are they at the mercy of the property rights of the building owner? In SF we believe tenants DO have rights. And you know what? RE investors here, where a rent controlled 2br apartment will set you back at least $3k a month in the city, are doing quite alright. They don't seem too desperately in need of expanded protections under the law.
everyone except the lucky few who can get
rent controlled apartments
* It's hard to move. Say you change jobs and now work in a different part of the city, or your kids move out, or you'd like to move in with a partner. Normally one of the benefits of renting is that you can move, but with rent control that means switching to a place that's much more expensive.
* Landlords benefit from having their long-time tenants leave. Without rent control landlords love long term tenants because they're reliable and they mean less work finding people for the apartment. Rent control reverses this, and the landlord loses the incentive to upgrade the apartment and otherwise keep the tenant happy. Yes, the landlord is being a jerk when they do it, but sometimes the best fix for widespread jerk-ness is changing the incentives.
* It keeps out outsiders. People who want to live in your city enough that they're willing to give up their existing local connections and start over in your city are really valuable, and rent control means they pay a lot more than people who've lived in the city longer.
* It depresses new construction. Yes, I know new buildings aren't subject to rent control, but in a place where everything is already built out you can't put up a new building without taking down an old one. Rent control means you either have legal restrictions saying you can't replace buildings, or you have protests against people doing this and displacing existing tenants. But in a growing city, without new construction housing is going to get more and more expensive.
* Rent control puts off dealing with the problem of housing costs. If everyone in SF rented, and everyone had to pay market rates, then there would be the political backing for changes that would make housing more affordable. Rent control means that the long-time community members who would be best at this political change don't really feel much urgency because they have nice cheap places with rents set a decade or two ago. (But to be fair, homeownership is also a problem here, because rents and property values move together and homeowners want their property to become more valuable.)
RE investors here, where a rent controlled 2br apartment
will set you back at least $3k a month in the city, are
doing quite alright. They don't seem too desperately in
need of expanded protections under the law.
Rent control reverses this, and the landlord loses the
incentive to upgrade the apartment and otherwise keep the
tenant happy.
Perhaps in a market where there is sufficient supply for demand, but in a market where demand is sufficiently high, many property owners don't do more than what is legally required and keep raising their rents.
You would not believe some of the dumps I've been shown by smiling realtors or owners that wanted thousands of dollars per month -- I'm talking about $2500+ a month for a two-bedroom apartment with boarded-over holes in Windows, holes in walls, a terrible smell and carpet that looks like it was last replaced decades ago.
Time after time, the pattern I've seen from experience in the Bay Area has been that owners will do whatever the market will bear -- in a market with severely constrained supply, the market is forced to bear quite a bit.
If everyone in SF rented, and everyone had to pay market rates, then there
would be the political backing for changes that would make housing more
affordable.
Sometimes the state just needs to step in and actually help people (by directly building high quality housing and selling it to people below market value). Currently if you buy a new build in London it is priced so high that you can expect it to be under water for a few years (the builders provide special mortgages because banks refuse to do them directly in many cases - the flats are not worth what they are being sold for).
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/aug/11/tory-foreign...
All of your points are predicated on the notion that rents would decline if you eliminated RC. I think that's... hopeful. I mean, in some places you seem to suggest that landlords are beset by low rents (not improving the place because of it, hoping their longstanding renters move out). So certainly all of those landlords would raise rents. And non-RC units will, what? Reduce their prices to equalize the market? I doubt that. And now you have higher rents all over the city. And that's good for people? Because it might spur more development? But development is slow and favors up-market construction.
And blaming lack of development on the tenant-displacement laws that are part of rent control? And suggesting that rent control is the problem is a farce. If it's these laws that are the problem, why not write a post assailing THEM? And rent control laws are the reason people protest these developments? Really?
Being hard to move... ok... so go tell the family that you're raising their rent so that they'll get used to paying market rate. That way they'll be able to move anywhere they want! What a great deal for them!
I know for some reason you think rents will go down. That developers will build new buildings at high expense in this seismic-zone and then undercut the existing market (of old buildings with tiny rooms and few modern amenities), ignoring the fact that if they build up-market they can write leases at $50/sqft and have no trouble renting out the entire building well before it's finished.
Finally, if you actually read rent control laws, you'll see that they are not these cartoonish works of absurd leftist ideology, they do make carve-outs and exceptions for capital improvements and other large expenses to be passed-thru as bigger rent increases to the tenants. They are surely not perfect but property owners are a very powerful bloc and their voices are heard in the law IMO.
Libertarian nerds aren't the only people in society.