Watch the video above for the full story, but the image at the center of it is worth sitting with on its own.
Thomas Sowell describes visiting West Berlin decades after World War II and being struck by how thoroughly the city had rebuilt — modern, functional, very much alive. Not long after, he drove into the Bronx to visit relatives, and saw block after block of abandoned, boarded-up buildings. His observation cuts straight to the point: if someone from another planet had to guess which of the two cities had been bombed in World War II, they’d pick the Bronx without hesitation. Berlin had recovered from actual bombing. The Bronx hadn’t recovered from rent control.
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That’s not a rhetorical flourish. It’s a direct comparison between a city that suffered real wartime destruction and a neighborhood that suffered decades of a policy originally sold as temporary.
Why would a law meant to be temporary end up outlasting a city that was leveled by bombs and rebuilt from the ground up?
Because rent control carries a structural flaw most people never notice until it’s already entrenched: it guarantees the exact condition it claims to be solving. Rent control is typically introduced during a housing shortage, with language promising it’s only in effect until the shortage ends. But capping rents below market rate reduces the incentive to build or maintain housing, which keeps the shortage alive indefinitely — which means the law, by its own stated terms, never reaches the condition required for its own repeal.
Paris adopted rent control as an emergency wartime measure during World War I. It was still on the books when World War II began. Sweden introduced similar controls in the early days of World War II. Decades later, they were still in place — until, for reasons the record doesn’t fully explain, someone finally removed them. The result was immediate: a housing surplus appeared almost overnight, and government housing projects that had struggled for years suddenly had vacancy rates high enough to require a financial bailout just to stay afloat.
What does it say about an institution that an entire housing market can recover within months of a policy being lifted, after decades of shortage under that same policy?
It says the shortage was never really about a lack of housing capacity. It was about a law actively preventing that capacity from being built or maintained, for as long as the law stayed in place — which, without some external force intervening, turned out to be the better part of a century in more than one country.
That’s the deeper pattern worth sitting with: a policy that fails for fifty, sixty, seventy years, consistently, across different countries and different decades, with no built-in mechanism forcing anyone to revisit it. Nobody votes a failing rent control law off the books once the damage becomes visible, because the people most harmed by it — the ones living in buildings nobody has an incentive to maintain — have the least power to force that correction. The Bronx didn’t fail to rebuild because nobody cared. It failed to rebuild because the law made rebuilding irrational, year after year, for longer than most people currently living there have been alive.
Watch the full explanation in the video above for how this connects to the housing debates happening right now.
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All these rent control policies should be removed from, The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island. But no politician is smart enough or brave enough to say it, much less attempt to do it.
Only slightly related; Federal Income Tax was also supposed to be temporary, and get this… mainly paid for by only the highest income earners. It’s partially true that the top still pay for a majority of taxes collected, but it’s hardly only them.