Rent regulation

Mark McIlroy

02.12.2025



The cause of poverty is rent. The poor do not own homes, they live in houses and pay rent to the owner.

In many cases, this rent is far higher than the cost of building or maintaining the house, and effectively takes everything that the person has.

*Footnote.


This is my suggestion for regulated maximum rents.


1. Have five levels of building quality, from ramschackle to high-end luxury. The levels of maintenance from degraded, to average, to new.

For a total of 15 rental categories.


2. Make a regulation for the maximum rent an owner can charge, based on category and number of meters of living space.


3. This should be set to a level which is a fair profit margin over the cost of the building.


4. In high-demand areas there would be intensive competition for houses, however that is a different problem.


Notes on economics

It is an effect of economics that rents rise to the highest sustainable levels. Economic theory says that if prices are high, more supply is generated, which lowers prices to a fair level.

However with housing this is impossible, because the available land area is fixed. In major city areas, if the population increases, the
supply of housing remains the same, and effectively rents are bidded up to the highest levels that tenants are able to pay.

The only solutions to this problem are regulated rents, or for large areas of the population to move to rural areas where land is plentiful and new houses can be built.


*To be fair there is a second cause of poverty, which is a tendency of some people to throw their money away on goods that decline in value
to zero over time, instead of accumulating their money over the long term. However the primary driver is rent, because many people have nothing left over to accumulate after paying their rent.