A rent-control study found home values fell 5% — and the thread can't agree if that's the bad news
St. Paul passed strict rent control in 2021. Within nine months, property values dropped 4.4% to 5.8%. The paper frames this as wealth destroyed; half the thread reads the same number as houses becoming more affordable.
The paper studies who gains and loses from rent control by tracking St. Paul property values after its 2021 ordinance. The headline finding: values fell 4.4–5.8% in nine months, a hit it attributes to lost landlord and homeowner wealth.
Commenters punctured the setup. The data window is nine months of pandemic-and-unrest 2021; the study dropped Minneapolis as a control on what one reader called a 'bullshit reason'; and the host, RHAWA, is a landlord lobbying group.
The finding, and the number everyone fixates on
The source is an academic paper, The Redistribution of Housing Wealth Caused by Rent Control, hosted as a PDF. Its method: treat St. Paul, Minnesota's 2021 rent-control ordinance as a natural experiment and measure what happened to the housing wealth of renters, landlords, and homeowners. The headline result, lifted straight from the abstract by the top commenter:
"Over the nine months following the passage of rent control in St. Paul, Minnesota in 2021, average property values fell by 4.4% to 5.8%." — a commenter quoting the abstract
The paper reads that drop as wealth destroyed — landlords and owners lose, and the gains to renters skew toward wealthier tenants who hold the controlled units. Download the PDF.
The same statistic, read as a feature
The first reversal is that the paper's central 'cost' is a benefit from the buyer's seat:
"So in addition to rents being more affordable… limiting the rental market profits also makes houses more affordable to buy? The paper is trying to argue this is bad, but I'm not seeing it." — a commenter who flipped the framing
Whether a 5% fall in property values is damage or progress depends entirely on whether you own or want to buy — and the paper picks a side without saying so.
Three holes in the identification
The methodological objections are specific. The window is nine months of 2021 — peak COVID distortion layered on Twin Cities civil unrest, which one local commenter argued is the actual variable being measured. And a reader who'd read past the abstract caught the control-city move:
"their mistake is that they excluded Minneapolis for a bullshit reason here. you might as well do the analysis and then tell us. of course, they did, and found all the same effects as st. paul despite no rent control" — a commenter who read the paper's appendix
If the neighboring city without rent control showed the same price moves, the effect isn't cleanly rent control. A third commenter added the provenance asterisk: RHAWA, the site serving the PDF, is a landlord lobbying group.
The asterisk that dates the whole debate
The most useful context came from someone tracking what St. Paul did next:
"This paper is from 2023. In 2025, St. Paul massively rolled back rent control restrictions… Developers argued that any rent control at all limited their ability to finance housing projects. I think results of studies like this were hugely influential to the changes in rent control that followed." — a commenter who followed the St. Paul rollback
That's the real arc. St. Paul's original ordinance had no exemptions; by 2025 it had been softened toward the San Francisco model — vacancy resets to market rate, new construction exempt. A separate voice offered the historical bracket: when Boston ended rent control in the late 1990s, landlords poured money into long-neglected buildings and the housing stock improved, even as buyers like him paid far more. The deeper consensus in the thread isn't pro- or anti-control — it's that arguing about controlling rents sidesteps the binding constraint, which several commenters named as zoning and a long supply drought. A land-value tax, not a rent cap, was the alternative that kept recurring.
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