Agreed. Whether there is rent control, the local authority should be obliged to offer to let houses at the controlled rent to people wanting them, building new houses if necessary.

I don't think there is any way to get a voting system to stop favoring people who vote in the current election over people who can't or don't, but the OP was talking about something different: local governments favoring a slight minority of voters (landlords, some of whom are nonresidents and can't vote at all) over the larger number of tennants. I say "slight minority" because quite a few "landlords" are not the Victorian aristocrats our cultural legacies from Marx's time make them out to be but rather individual people who saved up and now let one property.

The "problem of faction" is theoretically solved via representative democracy. That was the idea in the Federalist Papers.

It's not perfect but absolutely works better than direct democracy which has led to things like Prop 13 and it's endless extensions

> any way to get a voting system to stop favoring people who vote in the current election over people who can't or don't

Would that even be desirable? I feel that serving the desires of the voters is an essential (and desirable) property of democracy.

We do want majority decision making, but Democracy, outside a theoretically extreme sense, is self-determination for all, not just the majority.

That's the reason for rule of law, human rights, and limited government - to protect those without power. The people with power always have had self-determination.

Totally agreed; nevertheless, any voting system capable of expressing the desires of voters should result in an outcome that better meet their desires than the desires of non-voters. If it didn’t, why would anyone vote?

> I don't think there is any way to get a voting system to stop favoring people who vote in the current election over people who can't or don't

The purpose of human rights is to protect those people.

> I say "slight minority" because quite a few "landlords" are ... individual people who saved up and now let one property.

I agree, but that seems to be changing as these large investors buy up homes. That change is the point.

The question was, 'are local governments controlled by landlords?' Rent control is an evidence that they are not.

Local governments are controlled by property owners. Rent control harms landlords but they are still property owners and the lack of competition makes selling apartments more lucrative.

You repeat the claim, but the evidence says otherwise.