Silver bullets and buckshot

Every so often I get a call from an estate agent. They aren’t looking to sell my home, but let it out. London is a rentier economy, and so rent controls are bitterly resisted. Rent control isn’t a silver bullet. In fact, there are no silver bullets in housing. There are only, in Jenny Jones’ memorable phrase, silver buckshot. You need lots of policies working together to bring down the beast. Dave Hill, a well informed and generally fair-minded journalist, is very cautious about rent controls.  His latest musings on the subject do a very good job of summarising detailed and tentative research produced for the London Assembly’s Housing Committee by the Cambridge Centre for Housing and Planning Research. The killer argument against rent controls, which Dave cites, is that they stop people building more homes. This matters, because the silver bullet most commonly reached for is “just build more homes”. Of course, in…