Hi, Ben,
Short answer: Rent control has passed in these California cities -- Los Angeles, Santa Monica, San Francisco, San Jose and Berkeley -- and at least 125 municipalities in New Jersey.
Long answer: From the 1997 source I quote below, I have just learned that my impression of rent control is colored by my sixty years living in my native city of Los Angeles, California. (Here in Nevada, some people call our neighbor
The People's Republic of California.) Even left-leaning Vermont has, or has had, a constitutional prohibition on rent control. So, I could have invested in income property in another state, and I considered that too twenty years ago. The problem for me was that, if I did that, I couldn't see the property personally except at considerable transportation expense. Anyone who prudently distributes his income property investments geographically faces the same problem. Maybe that's an argument for income property in Hawaii, so you can deduct the cost of visiting the place. :D
http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=864 During the 1970s, it appeared that rent control might be the wave of the future. Boston and several of its surrounding suburbs imposed rent control during the inflationary years of 1969 to 1971. President Richard Nixon imposed wage and price controls in 1971 on the entire country, freezing all rents in the process. Many cities retained rent controls, eventually making them permanent, after wage and price controls expired. Washington, DC, for example, still has rent regulations from this period, as do about 125 municipalities in New Jersey.
In 1978, California activist Howard Jarvis promised during the Proposition 13 anti-tax campaign that tenants' rents would be reduced if the proposed state constitutional amendment lowered property taxes. In the midst of an inflationary period, the rent reduction failed to materialize, frustrating many tenants. Berkeley and Santa Monica, two smaller cities with radical political cultures, led the state in imposing very strict rent control ordinances. Ten cities--including San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Jose--eventually adopted rent regulation. More than half the state's tenant population were governed by rent control ordinances. One major California city, San Diego, bucked the trend, rejecting rent control by a 2-to-1 margin in a 1985 referendum.
By the mid 1980s, more than 200 municipalities nationwide were living under rent control ordinances, affecting about 20 percent of the nation's population. This proved to be the high tide of the movement. As inflationary pressures eased, the agitation for rent control subsided.
Some cities have remained strangely immune from the rent control temptation. Chicago, with one of the largest proportions of renters of any American city, has never seriously entertained proposals for rent control. Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cleveland, and other eastern cities outside the Boston-New York-Washington axis have never experimented with this policy. In the major cities of the south and southwest--Atlanta, New Orleans, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix--rent control is simply not an issue. During the 1980s, a reaction set in among southern, western, and rural states. Some 31 states, as diverse as Idaho, Florida, Texas, and Vermont, adopted laws and constitutional amendments forbidding rent control.
He who has lived obscurely and quietly has lived well. [Latin: Bene qui latuit, bene vixit.]
Chips