TBH, I'm very surprised (disheartened?) that your comment has been downvoted. Your last sentence is very true - economists on the most "conservative" and "liberal" sides of the profession all agree that rent control is counter productive.
You know where housing is still pretty affordable and you can make a decent living even if you're poor? Houston, which famously doesn't have zoning. Granted, this can cause lots of other problems (many attribute a lot of the flood damage caused by Hurricane Harvey to overbuilding), but it seems very clear that if you want to have affordable housing, you have to build an f-ton of housing, and Houston has done that, while all of these over-regulated housing-crisis cities clearly have not.
> Your last sentence is very true - economists on the most "conservative" and "liberal" sides of the profession all agree that rent control is counter productive.
No, I wouldn't say it is true. The things is most people on hacker news would agree that it is so because you have read it so many times before. But they can't actually specify what that actually is because that isn't really known. All that economists really agree on is rent control is unsurprisingly a worse way to allocate resources based on money. But that says little to nothing about the political and social costs which makes the economic discussion largely irrelevant. If rent control decreases market efficiency by 5%, but increases political efficiency orders of magnitude because people no longer fear that building more will force them to move, it is a worthy trade off. Similarly to achieve affordable housing without rent control in an already hot market requires the government to implement changes to the direct detriment of landlords and land owners, which usually isn't popular.
Economics isn't a field like others. It is very overtly political. Unless you know exactly what they can and can't prove, and to what degree they can prove it, it might not be relevant. Which isn't something you will actually find most of the time, because it often isn't.
You know where housing is still pretty affordable and you can make a decent living even if you're poor? Houston, which famously doesn't have zoning. Granted, this can cause lots of other problems (many attribute a lot of the flood damage caused by Hurricane Harvey to overbuilding), but it seems very clear that if you want to have affordable housing, you have to build an f-ton of housing, and Houston has done that, while all of these over-regulated housing-crisis cities clearly have not.