Hacker News Reader

Has there been any consideration by state/city governments to temporarily lift these restrictions until the pandemic is over so long as prices don't exceed the prepandemic price once we return to normalcy?

Again, I'm uniformed on this issue as I live in an area that doesn't practice rent control. Happy to hear if this is a bad idea for some reason I'm not thinking of.

View on HN

> Has there been any consideration by state/city governments to temporarily lift these restrictions until the pandemic is over so long as prices don't exceed the prepandemic price once we return to normalcy?

Can't you imagine the headlines? 'Sweetheart deal for politicially-connected landlords allows rent-control evasion for the next year!'

I thought the whole point of rent-control was to keep prices from going up? In this instance they would be going down.

How could you spin that as a good thing for landlords? Ignoring blatantly false news, that is.

The idea was to allow prices to quickly return to their current level after going down, in what would normally be a violation of rent-control policies. That would easily be spun as allowing landlords to raise rent more quickly than they normally could.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com