> (Your linked paper there also says that rent control results in more properties having affordable rent at the low end of the market, but less overall rental property supply, indicating a reduction at the higher end.

Your conclusion is completely wrong.

What happens when you reduce the higher end of the rental property range? Do you think the people who would have been renting those properties simply vanish? Disappear from the rental market?

No, obviously they don't. So what are they doing instead? They're renting those mid-end properties instead. And what happens to the people who would have rented those mid-end properties that are now occupied by the wealthier renters? They get pushed to the low-end properties. What happens to the people who were trying to get into the low-end properties? They're pushed into being roommates or leaving the city.

Any policy that reduces overall housing supply is a loss for the low end. The way you're bending over backwards to try to imagine this as a good thing indicates something very wrong with your assumptions.

This is a case where someone has become so narrowly focused on hurting the people they perceive as wealthy (people who rent the expensive units) that even solutions that hurt the poor (policies which reduce housing supply) look like a good idea. This isn’t a good way to think.

> Do you think the people who would have been renting those properties simply vanish? Disappear from the rental market?

Actually yes, entirely unironically.

We even have evidence of this dynamic in Melbourne. When various tax measures were taken that sucked some of the profit out of investment properties, making landlordism less attractive, we saw there was less competition for house purchasing from well-funded investors. This in turn allowed would-be owner-occupiers to buy more houses, as they were no longer forced into rentals they didn't want, no longer outcompeted by those with easier access to larger lines of credit. This reduces the population of people seeking rentals.

Result - decline in the absolute numbers of rental properties in the city, but an increase in rental property vacancy and a slight decrease in rents.

> Any policy that reduces overall housing supply is a loss for the low end.

Except it doesn't reduce the overall housing supply, because overall housing supply includes both rental properties and owner-occupied properties. Those houses don't just disappear.

You're making the (false) assumptions that there is no interplay between the two markets and that everyone that lives in a rented house wants to live in a rented house.