Forty years of rent control: Reexamining New Jersey’s moderate local policies after the great recession

•New Jersey cities have had moderate rent control policies for four decades.•We analyze rent control’s (presence and strength) impact on cities’ rental housing.•We compare controlled and non-controlled cities in our models.•Ultimately, rent control exerts no significant impacts at the aggregate level.•We encourage a rethinking of affordable housing by proponents and opponents.

This study replicates, using 2010 Census data, and extends past work on moderately rent-controlled municipalities in New Jersey, which began policies to stabilize rents while allowing landlords modest returns in the 1970s. Our approach compares controlled and non-controlled communities over 10,000 persons; and regresses rental housing characteristics (rent and quality/quantity) on two measures of rent control: nominal (1/0) and ordinal (an index of policy diversity/strength). Because the decade 2000–2010 was unique due to the housing bubble and recession, we expand previous analyses by introducing two additional dependent variables: changes in property values, which may be affected by restrictions on rents; and foreclosure rates, a problem affecting investors and a proxy for abandonment. We find that these 40-year-old policies do not exert any statistically-significant effects on their communities’ housing markets once other factors are controlled—a finding which has implications for affordable housing and advocacy in New Jersey and beyond.