Very true. I guess, in this case, we'd all like to see it divert from a perfectly free market. We manage capitalism in a million other places; it wouldn't be totally out of line. And it wouldn't be like rent control in NYC, or something else that distorts entire economies and ruins markets.

There are far stronger arguments for rent price control, due to artificially constrained supply, power asymmetry, and cost of switching vendors, than there are for commodity price control.

> artificially constrained supply

Rent control artificially constrains supply...

> power asymmetry

This, and its cousin "information asymmetry" are generally applied to negotiations. Are you implying that housing isn't a fair market because landlords know so much more about their property than the buyers, and that price controls can solve that? I don't even think I agree with the premise, let alone the solution.

> cost of switching vendors

Sure, but price controls don't solve this. If you don't want the renter to shoulder the cost of moving, you make the landlord reimburse them for moving expenses, just like lots of cities do right now.

Rent control doesn't make existing apartments get beamed up onto the Starship Enterprise, and supply of housing isn't primarily constrained by it. It's constrained by a lot of other things, and maybe when those other barriers are removed, and a bunch of houses get built, it might start being constrained by this one. But that's not where we are today.

I imply that the market is imbalanced because someone not having a place to live for a month is homeless, while a landlord not having a tenant for a month is a multi-millionaire who is out a few thousand bucks.

This wouldn't matter in markets with reasonable vacancy rates, but in markets with unhealthily-low vacancy rates, tenants have to eat whatever shit that trickles down to them, because they can't go somewhere else.

This should all be obvious to anyone who rents.

> Sure, but price controls don't solve this.

Not directly, no, but cost of switching (for both tenant and landlord) is a reason for why rental markets are quite weird, compared to commodity ones.