Before we had kids, my husband and I (Tina) lived in a one-bedroom, rent-controlled apartment in Washington, DC. After a few months, our heating bill started to be unreasonably high—much higher than was possible for a one-bedroom apartment in the middle of a building. We reported this to the utility company and to the landlord, but neither fixed it. For months, this went on and we paid $300 or more in heating bills until finally we broke the lease, lost our deposit, and had to move somewhere else.

Part of the reason that our landlord didn’t fix our heating problems may be because DC rent control laws stipulate (PDF) that when a tenant moves out of an apartment, the landlord can raise the rent to market rate. This means that our landlord had an incentive to get us out, whether directly through eviction or indirectly through not fixing problems in the unit.

This is a common complaint amongst tenant advocates and a reason why rent control might not be working as well as it could. Indeed, how policies such as rent control are designed is key to ensuring they make housing affordable.

In new research, we investigate how tenant advocates, landlords, developers, policymakers, and practitioners think about rent control, regulations that place hard caps on maximum rents or limits on the amount that rent can increase over time, and inclusionary zoning (IZ), which requires or incentivizes developers to create affordable units within market-rate developments. We also examine how components of these regulations affect these stakeholders’ incentives and behaviors.

Read the full article about rent control and inclusionary shows by Christina Plerhoples Stacy, Eleanor Noble, and Jorge Morales-Burnett at Urban Institute.