ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the arguments for government involvement in the housing sector, summarizes what is known about the effects of several major government housing programs in the United States, and develops the implications of the preceding for housing policy. Rent control has been a major type of government regulation of housing throughout the world for many years. Housing economists have made few attempts to calculate rates of return on rental housing and to compare them with returns on other types of investment, but they have provided indirect evidence in support of their views by deriving and testing other implications of competitive models of housing markets. One indication of the distortion in consumption patterns of occupants of controlled housing is the divergence between the benefit to tenants and the cost to landlords. Federal housing programs for low-income families have emphasized the construction of new units beginning in the 1930's with the public housing program.
