Here’s the thing about housing: if you could magically press a price-control button and make all rents in NYC affordable, permanently, with no concern for operating costs etc, it would lead to outrageous waitlists and lotteries. People would avoid moving at all costs, and it would be nearly impossible to move within-city. Anyone who wanted to move to New York would end up waiting a decade to get a place. That’s because there is a *real physical shortage of housing* in NYC, and that short supply is allocated presently through price mechanisms. In our magical world where prices can be declared by fiat with no ill-consequence, the short supply would be allocated by waitlist and lottery instead. But, before you either praise me or get mad at me for saying this, take note: *many people would strongly prefer this to the present system, if they had this choice.* In fact, I would guess that *most* people would prefer such a system. An analogy: in a disaster, price gouging is “efficient,” but people fucking loathe it. They strongly prefer long lines or lotteries over high prices, because they are more *morally fair* in the eyes of most people. Whenever there is a shortage, price rises are *efficient* and also *despised*. Obviously, everyone would prefer to pay less for things they want and need—which is another way of saying we’d all like to be richer, because that’s what wealth really is: the actual quantity and quality of stuff you can acquire. But it’s much deeper than that. There is also an underlying sense of fairness that gouging violates, and there is an underlying need for *stability* and *security* that it destroys. Many people would happily choose the hypothetical NYC of decade-long waitlists because, once you’re in, even if you have less freedom to move around, you’re *secure*. You no longer have to have anxiety about losing your housing. It removes a huge part of the background radiation of anxious, precarious modern life. Now, I prefer that we build a ton of housing to resolve the shortages in big cities, and I would like much of that housing to be state-operated. But when we talk about things like rent control, you *must* confront the political, moral, and genuinely hedonic dimensions.