The housing crisis in California is spurring another round of advocacy for rent control.

With rents having reached heights making even one bedroom apartments unaffordable to many working residents, it seems like a logical and workable solution.

That is, if you believe government regulation can solve housing affordability issues and transcend market economics.

Make no mistake, however, the high cost of housing already has shifted the debate on rent control.

This week, state legislators will be hearing a proposal from a Democratic assemblyman that would allow cities to dramatically restrict what landlords can charge tenants year-over-year. A similar bill last year collapsed amid intense opposition from landlords.

This year’s proposed bill will come in advance of a potential ballot initiative supported by tenants’ rights groups that would put in place similar restrictions. That means if the legislative bill either stalls or is shot down, more than likely voters will be seeing rent control on the November ballot.

While several bigger California cities like San Francisco, Oakland and Los Angeles have some sort of rent control on the books (and continue to see rental costs rising), current state law prohibits any locality in California from imposing rent control on properties built after 1995. That’s the year the state passed the Costa-Hawkins Act, which also prohibited cities that already had rent control laws on their books from updating them for new properties. Tenant groups from around the state plan to gather in Sacramento Thursday to press legislators to repeal Costa-Hawkins.

In Santa Cruz, ranked one of the most unaffordable places in the world to live, advocates of rent control drew a big crowd of students and others in October cheering on a rent control campaign in 2018. About 60 percent of city residents are renters — numbers that are skewed by the student population from UC Santa Cruz.

And the issue becomes even more stark when the escalating cost of owning a home makes renting seem like a more affordable option.

But the housing market is just that, a market, and rises and falls on market forces. Policies, no matter how well intentioned, that attempt to substitute government involvement for basic economics just make housing more expensive.

How?

Because just as with any kind of government-required price ceiling, rent control creates shortages. Demand will rise for more and cheaper rent-controlled housing than what is available, which will lead to additional market pressures. That’s partly because by making rental housing less profitable, rent control discourages investors and builders from wanting to build more housing.

Rent control also diminishes the quality of rental housing. Because since landlords have less money to devote to repairs, there’s less incentive to make improvements — with the added disincentive that rent control creates an artificially high demand for their units. Moreover, people living in rent controlled, or government-subsidized, housing often don’t want to leave, not wanting to pay more somewhere else. So they stay, causing relatively little rent-controlled housing to come back on the market, such as it is.

The housing market works like any other, regulated by supply and demand.

California — and most glaringly, coastal California — does not build enough housing, and provide enough well paying jobs near housing, to create a marketplace with affordable housing.

The reasons why are numerous: NIMBYism, stringent planning and zoning policies, environmental regulations, high fees — and along the coast, the price and availability of buildable space.

These are all reasons why the vast majority of economists, no matter their political ideology, oppose rent control.

We understand that rent control sounds attractive if you’re trying to keep a roof over your family’s head while paying half your monthly income for a small apartment. But trying to paper over the housing affordability crisis with government controls will only ensure the real causes will not be dealt with.