Under rent control the highest possible rent is set by laws. If you fall behind on the allowed rent increase you’re usually not allowed to catch up to market rate later, such as when your tenant leaves and you put the unit back on the market. So to avoid getting stuck at below market rate with no legal way to catch up, you have to take the maximum allowable rent increase every year. In some situations it’s better to leave a unit empty and wait for someone be willing to rent at the rate than it is to lower rent, because the consequences of lowering rent will stick with the unit for years.

Without rent control, rents can be kept constant, moved up, or moved down without having to consider the consequences for years to come. The ceiling is set by the market rate, but there isn’t a function driving all of the landlords to raise by the annually permissible maximum so they try to discover it instead.

Rent control is instituted in cities that have constrained housing supplies, so the demand is there. Landlords switch to raising rents in unison by the maximum allowable amount every year because that’s the only way to operate.

They would. But second order effects ensure that this very act leads to the decline of housing prices. These effects being eliminated by rent control makes it the premier anti-tenant policy.

With rent control, you are limited in how you can increase rent later, so it’s to your benefit to let the apartment sit vacant longer until you get a desirable rent. Without rent control, because you can just increase rent next year by whatever, you can rent it at the market rate right away without waiting.

The market is 2-sided. They can "seek" whatever they want but they are going to get the clearing price.

You might prefer to have the vacancy filled faster rather than waiting for the highest possible price. These algorithmic pricing cases kind of revolve around this concept. It is the value that the service provided the companies.

Landlord input a desired vacancy rate or time on Market, and service suggests the right price.

The Dubai rent control system has some important differences compared to Berkeley. Dubai’s rent change is indexed to the rental market but Berkeley’s isn’t. Berkeley’s max change in a year is like 1% while Dubai’s could be as high as 20% in some cases.

Also, in Dubai if the owner wants to sell and not renew the lease they can. In Berkeley it’s not nearly so simple.

I would not want to be a landlord in Berkeley.

> Rules without punishments are useless though.

There’s proportional punishment based on harm, and then there are abusive booby-traps. If a landlord uses a nonpublic dataset (e.g., a vendor’s model based on year-old data that would not harm competition under the antitrust settlement), then a tenant and nonprofit can each sue for civil penalties plus attorney fees even though there is no harm.

Yes, you would think that a city with such a rent crisis would be begging for development e.g. incentivizing homeowners to redevelop into townhouses and apartments. But instead, the so-called “Progressive” wing has very little interest in reducing market rents and prefers to chase fringe issues (to take one example, they spent the year 2015 very publicly attacking the “Moderate” David Chiu’s short-term rental law, only to arrive at substantively the same place that they started at the end of the year. And suddenly the issue disappeared).

A bunch of landlords all use the same software to tell them how to price rents. The software continually pushes prices higher and higher. The software requires landlords to use their pricing as a condition of use. Now you have a price-fixing cartel for rent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_fixing#:~:text=Rent%20al...

https://www.legis.ga.gov/api/legislation/document/20252026/2...

See Section 3

Like "price fixing". Landlords illegally colluding to artificially inflate the price of housing.