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I Introduction <br />Steadily rising housing rents in many of the US's large, productive cities has brought the <br />issue of affordable housing to the forefront of the policy debate and reignited the discussion <br />over expanding or enacting rent control provisions. State lawmakers in Illinois, Oregon, <br />and California are considering repealing laws that limit cities' ability to pass or expand <br />rent control. Already extremely popular around the San Rancisco Bay Area, with seven <br />cities having imposed rent control regulations, five additional Bay Area cities placed rent <br />control measures on the November 2016 ballot, with two passing. Rent control in the Bay <br />Area consists of regulated price increases within the duration of a tenancy, but no price <br />restrictions between tenants. Rent control also places restrictions on evictions. <br />A substantial body of economic research has warned about potential negative efficiency <br />consequences to limiting rent increases below market rates, including over -consumption of <br />housing by tenants of rent controlled apartments (Olsen (1972), Gyourko and Linneman <br />(1989)), mis-allocation of heterogeneous housing to heterogeneous tenants (Glaeser acid <br />Luttrner (2003), Sims (2011)), negative spillovers onto neighboring housing (Sims (2007), <br />Autor et al. (2014)) and, in particular, under -investment and neglect of required mainte- <br />nance (Downs (1988)). Yet, due to incomplete markets, in the absence of rent control many <br />tenants are unable to insure themselves against rent increases. A variety of affordable hous- <br />ing advocates have argued that tenants greatly value these insurance benefits, allowing them <br />to stay in neighborhoods in which they have spent many years and feel invested in. <br />Due to a lack of detailed data and natural experiments, we have little well -identified em- <br />pirical evidence evaluating the relative importance of these competing effects.' In this paper, <br />we bring to bear new micro data, exploit quasi -experimental variation in the assignment of <br />rent control provided by unique 1994 local San Rancisco ballot initiative, and employ struc- <br />tural modeling to fill this gap. We find tenants covered by rent control do place a substantial <br />rA notable exception to this is Sims (2007) and Autor e1; al. (2014) which use the repeal of rent control <br />in Cambridge, MA to study it's spillover effects onto nearby property values and building maintenance. <br />2 <br />