Rent Control Just Found a New Target. Economists Are Laughing. New York politicians want to apply rent stabilization to commercial retail leases. The same city where residential rent control produced 175,000 apartments with a single occupant in four or more rooms, according to a NYC study Sowell cited in Basic Economics. Where a San Francisco housing study found 26% of rent-controlled units housed tenants earning $100,000+. Where the black population of San Francisco dropped 23% in a single decade under "protective" housing policy. That's the residential record. Now they want to run the same experiment on storefronts. Sen. Julia Salazar and Assembly Member Emily Gallagher want a Commercial Rent Guidelines Board to cap annual increases and mandate 10-year lease terms. Thomas Sowell diagnosed this decades ago. His core argument: economic policies must be judged by the incentives they create, not the hopes that inspired them. Rent control doesn't lower rents. It kills the price signal. Builders stop building. Owners stop maintaining. The people it claims to protect end up in worse space, paying higher prices, in a shrinking market. 93% of economists in a 1992 American Economic Review survey agreed: rent ceilings reduce both the quality and quantity of available space. A 2012 IGM panel found only 2% thought rent control had a positive impact on affordable housing. That's not a split decision. That's a consensus. Commercial leases make this even more absurd. One tenant does $3,000 per square foot in sales. Another does $100. Every deal is custom. A board setting maximum increases across that range is like regulating restaurant prices without knowing the menu. Landlords at Bisnow's NYC Retail Conference said it plainly. They already negotiate custom deals because empty storefronts lose money. The incentive structure works. Sowell would call this what it is: politicians solving a problem they helped create, with a tool that has failed everywhere it's been tried. The first lesson of economics is scarcity. The first lesson of politics is to ignore the first lesson of economics. https://lnkd.in/ezCJ5cqx