 Meet Jessica. Jessica works at a local tech company. She likes her job, but she's always felt like she could do more. So she was very excited when she got a job offer from a tech startup in the big city. But there was one really big problem. Even with the higher salary they offered, there was no way she could afford to pay rent in the big city. This is unfair. Greedy landlords are exploiting vulnerable renters with high prices. It should be illegal to charge this much. This is a common demand people make, and on the surface it sounds like a good idea. Because it is one? Not exactly. How'd I know that was coming? The price of anything depends heavily on supply and demand. The reason rent is so high in most big cities is because a lot of people want to live there, but there isn't enough housing, so that means what is available is pretty expensive. You're telling me. Normally when the price of something, like rent, is very high, it's a signal that there's money to be made providing that thing to others. So entrepreneurs start making more of that thing so they can make money. And the more people are making a thing, the more the price for it decreases. As the suppliers start competing with each other. But rent control ruins that. Ruin? How could rent control ruin that? Government already makes creating housing way more expensive than it needs to be through regulatory burdens. But when the owners can charge whatever rent seems fair to them, there's at least a chance for them to make back the money they invested and hopefully earn a profit. But when the government puts a cap on the price of housing, it becomes almost impossible to earn a profit off of it. So yeah, the very few people who manage to get rent controlled places to live are happy with their below-market price housing. But it ultimately makes rent more expensive for everyone else, like Jessica here. Because builders know that the juice just isn't worth the squeeze. So the supply stays low, the demand stays high, and prices just keep going up. I guess that makes sense, but if government makes all these rules that cause the price of living to get so high, why don't they just stop? Why indeed.