Experience over the past six decades or so has shown that rent control is an ineffective and often counterproductive housing policy. Rent control makes housing less affordable to anyone seeking housing in a rent-controlled market. Even people who already have a great deal, and who gain the most from the current rent control mechanism become prisoners of their own apartment. The inherent disadvantages that plague the system tends to overshadow the minor successes that it can boast of. This paper has proven that rent control legislations are at best a stopgap arrangement and an inadequate solution to a seething urban problem. The problem of housing shortage that plagues our urban centers requires serious thinking. Short-term solutions like rent control legislations only serve to aggravate the problems. Rent control may be a good idea for a country like India to adopt in the years that followed Partition in 1947. Perhaps it represented the only way to ensure that impoverished refugees from Pakistan were given access to housing at affordable rates. Had it not been for rent control, most of these unfortunate souls would have found themselves on the streets, being unable to afford the competitive market rents on offer. However, Delhi, and India, has progressed since those dark days. The United States of America and other nations in the Western world have realised that the World Wars and the extraordinary economic crises of the time are now behind them, and States in the USA in particular has been in the forefront of the anti-rent control drive. The time has come for the government in India to cautiously liberalise the rent control regime and to allow the rents to be determined by the prevailing market forces.
Despite the good intentions of the originators of rent control legislations, whose avowed purpose was to make housing affordable, the experience from around the world was quite the opposite. Dr. Anthony Downs, a leading economist and internationally recognized expert on housing policy, concluded in a recent report on rent controls, that, other than during wartime, the economic and social costs of rent control “almost always outweigh any perceived short-term benefits they provide.” As mentioned earlier, rent control policies in the USA are now becoming extremely unpopular. Many in that Country feel that “Rent control is a disease of the mind that soon becomes a disease of the market.” Thus, it is believed that those cities that succumb to the disease of rent control are doomed to never-ending house-to-house warfare over an ever-diminishing supply of unaffordable housing. The agreement that rent control needs to be abolished cuts across the usual political spectrum, ranging all the way from Nobel Prize winners Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek on the “right” to their fellow Nobel Laureate Gunnar Myrdal, an important architect of the Swedish Labor Party’s welfare state, on the “left.” Myrdal once stated, “Rent control has in certain Western countries constituted, maybe, the worst example of poor planning by governments lacking courage and vision.” As was aptly noted by Assar Lindbeck, a renowned Swedish economist in 1971, “Rent control seems in many cases to be the most efficient technique, next to bombing, so far known for destroying cities.”
Whether the successful de-regulation measures that have been adopted in the USA and other Western nations can be successfully replicated in India is the point in question. Whether the socio-economic conditions that prevail in our country today will allow for such far reaching changes is also debatable. Obviously, a total ban on rent control legislation would be a preferable, but does not seem likely in the Indian context. Instead, those cities that still suffer from rent regulation must look at the attempts made to reform the process in Maharashtra and Karnataka in a favourable light. These new Acts that have come into place have contributed in no small measure in the battle to eliminate the archaic and often useless provisions of the rent control laws that had been hitherto prevalent. Rent control promotes gross inequality and inefficiency and goes against established legal principles of justice, equity and fair play. The sooner we get rid of it, the better it is for the nation as a whole. Hopefully, this will lead to an urban regeneration in India and will act as the catalyst for the proper and controlled growth of cities, commercial establishments and industries
Rented Building Owners Association Kerala 
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