In recent years, rent control regulations have reemerged as a potential solution to the housing affordability crisis. To better understand the effect of rent control across a wide variety of housing markets and policy regimes, we undertake the first cross-city panel analysis examining the effect of rent control reforms on rental housing supply across 27 US metropolitan areas, encompassing more than 4,000 cities.

To examine the relationship between rent control policies and rental housing supply, we generate two novel datasets. First, we use a machine-learning approach to identify rent control and rent stabilization reforms across multiple areas. Second, we create a detailed dataset of the rental housing supply across affordability levels in Census-designated places. We use two techniques to estimate the effect of rent control reforms on the supply of rental units across affordability levels: fixed effects with place-specific time trends and difference-in-differences with multiple treatment periods.

We find that rent control is associated with a reduction in the total number of units in a city. This confirms theoretical expectations regarding the impact of rent control on total supply. We are also able to determine whether all income levels are affected uniformly by focusing on the number of rental units affordable at different area median incomes. We find that rent control is associated with statistically significant increases in units affordable to extremely low-income households (those making less than 30 percent of area median income) and decreases in the number of units affordable to people with incomes above 120 percent of area median income.