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to their rent controlled units.4 In addition, to the extent that higher -income households have an advantage in tracking valuable information on available units, the expectation of equity gains from rent controls have seldom been realized by those who might most need the benefit, suggesting that rent control has not been a policy useful for lower income households to attain affordable housing. For many reasons, then, rent controls preclude land and housing markets from doing what they are supposed to do, namely allocate scarce resources to their highest and best uses in light of ever changing wants, opportunities and constraints. Rent control policies and by-laws vary in scope and severity. Flexible rent control regimes allow vacancy decontrol while more rigid regimes may permit rent increases tied to one of a variety of cost -of -living indices. Rent control regulations in many cities have gone through cycles of control and decontrol, in some cases resulting in various vintages of the stock being grandfathered. A visible result is that some cities have neighborhoods with well -kept free-market rental housing adjacent to poorly maintained rent controlled housing. Rent control systems are most well known for having been imposed on traditional multi -family rental housing units where the landlord owns the land and the building and rents individual units to tenants using formal or informal leasing arrangements. Legal systems have evolved to define the property rights of landlords and tenants. Rent controlled systems often `piggy -back' on these systems as security of tenure is critical if landlords are permitted to increase rents when a unit is vacated.5 In contrast, in mobile home parks, the site ("pad") is rented to the tenant who either acquires the mobile home from the prior tenant or buys a new mobile home which is then assembled on -site. The curious distinction from the more common rent control of multi -family apartment units is that in a mobile home park the landlord owns the land (the pad) and the tenant owns the improvements (the coach). If there is no vacancy decontrol (ability on the part of the landlord to adjust the pad rent to the market when the coach is sold), the net present value of the anticipated future rent savings will be capitalized into the sale price of the coach if it stays in place_ This unique aspect of rent control for mobile home parks has been the subject of some empirical analysis. Rent control systems for mobile home parks provide an opportunity to investigate the economic impact of the rent control policy on the tenants of mobile parks (i.e., the mobile coach owners)- 4 This type of effect has been documented in Glaeser and Luttmer (2003) for the case of the City of New York. ' In more draconian (rigid) rent control systems, changes are tied to the unit rather than the tenant.