RENT CONTROL SCHEME RETURNS! LOCAL LEFTIES RE-LEARN OBVIOUS ECONOMICS

Well, bless their hearts. Just when you thought the progressive politburo presiding over Santa Barbara's housing crisis couldn't get any more creatively destructive, the Santa Barbara Independent breathlessly reports on the 'long road' to rent stabilization. 'Long road,' indeed—longer than the list of people who actually benefit from these hair-brained schemes. What's next, price controls on air? Because that's about as sensible as telling property owners they can't charge market rates in a city where every new building permit requires a blood sacrifice and a five-year environmental impact study written in ancient Sumerian.

Our esteemed city council, clearly having exhausted all reasonable solutions like, say, *building more housing*, has decided the best way to tackle scarcity is to punish providers. It's the economic equivalent of trying to cure a headache by hitting yourself with a hammer. The only thing 'stabilized' by rent control is the value of your existing property, assuming you're lucky enough to own it, and the certainty that no new, affordable units will ever get built. But hey, it *sounds* good in a press release, doesn't it?

This isn't about 'affordability'; it's about control. It’s about signaling virtue while making sure the local populace, particularly those without a trust fund or a decades-old rent-controlled apartment, get squeezed even harder. The Whipping Post predicts this 'stabilization' will mostly stabilize the city's housing stock in a state of chronic undersupply, driving up costs for everyone else and ensuring the only beneficiaries are the activists who lobbied for it and the bureaucrats who get to administer the inevitable mountain of red tape. The referendum mentioned? That’s just the taxpaying citizens of this city trying to inject a dose of reality into a fantasy island. Good luck with that.