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Rent control is a failed housing policy

Rent control policies are a hot topic in Colorado, as evidenced by the state legislature’s draft release of the first rent control bill before the 2026 legislative session even began. This and other recently passed rental housing bills restrict and control how landlords operate, a trend that will continue as the legislature adds more regulation and price controls on multifamily property owners.

Since 2024, the Colorado legislature has passed several laws that laid the foundation for this year’s expected passage of a rent control bill. These new laws include House Bill 24-1098, which requires landlords to renew a lease with a current renter unless they have an evictable offense to not continue their lease. This is referred to as a perpetual lease, and ensures renters can remain in their apartments for many years, keeping any rent-controlled rate in effect.

Lawmakers also passed HB 25-1240, which tightly controls the tenant application and eviction processes, making it difficult for landlords to effectively screen out bad rental applicants and creates onerous and expensive requirements to evict tenants. Finally, they passed HB 25-1090, the so-called Junk Fee Bill, which strictly limits the fees a landlord can charge renters, thus making it next to impossible for landlords to increase their lost rental revenue from other sources.

With these laws in place, legislators will now bring forward a rent control bill that restricts property owners’ ability to raise rents any higher than the local consumer price index, which currently sits around 2%. This meager annual adjustment doesn’t give consideration to the significant increases to expenses that housing providers are experiencing, and only focuses on enacting price controls on the revenue side of the equation. Skyrocketing costs for insurance and utilities alone will hamstring property owners, who will not have the income to adequately maintain their properties, which will fall into disrepair, as their costs of doing business exceeds the revenues they receive.

The legislature placed a statewide ban on rent control in 1981, but after these 45 years, a new generation of progressive lawmakers wrongly believe that rent control is a solution to our growing housing crisis. Although these decision-makers likely have the best intentions, in practice, rent control policies have never proven to reduce housing costs in the long term, and
instead further harm renters as developers stop building new multifamily housing in Colorado, as they cannot earn the income they need to serve our communities.

Local multifamily owner and operator Weidner Apartment Homes, which owns 18 multifamily properties in Colorado Springs with over 3,000 homes, experienced this dilemma in St. Paul, Minn., after the city enacted strict rent control laws in 2021. Weidner purchased land and began building 2,200 planned market-rate apartments, when rent control became the city’s plan to increase housing affordability. After reviewing the city’s ordinance, Weidner placed its project on an indefinite hold as costs no longer penciled out. This decision had immediate effects for St. Paul as it removed 2,000 new homes from development in a city that desperately needed new housing, and indirectly affected the production of 760 new affordable housing units that lost bond funding with Weidner’s departure.

Greg Cerbana, Weidner’s vice president of public relations and governmental affairs, testified against this fatal policy decision, but the city ultimately passed the law. After several years, it became apparent that St. Paul had gone too far and needed to pull back on many of the harmful aspects of the law.

Weidner was one of many that helped to negotiate a 2025 change to the city’s policy that now exempts new housing developments built after 2004 from their onerous rent control policies. As a result, Weidner has made the decision to restart the development of two buildings, hopeful that the city’s current housing policies will remain intact.

Cities are each unique and, for Colorado Springs, rent control laws will disproportionately harm our military service members, who rent homes for the few years of their assignment to the region. These families will pay higher rents as rates are adjusted more frequently when units turn over for new renters. But even long-term renters will be harmed as their units and buildings become neglected from disinvestment and lack of maintenance. This will create blight, which in turn increases crime, causing further disinvestment. These are terrible but inevitable outcomes for Colorado’s cities under rent control policies.

Rent control laws harm everyone except the increasingly bloated government, that will, over time, gain ownership of many downtrodden and bankrupt housing properties as their owners sell or walk away, as Weidner did in 2021 in St. Paul. The best thing we can do as a state is prevent these policies from ever getting a foothold.

With that, we hope you will contact your state legislators (you can find yours here: https://leg.colorado.gov/legislators) and let them know that you support the free market, not price controls, to ensure property owners are able to provide affordable housing options for all of Colorado’s residents.

Jill Gaebler is executive director of the Pikes Peak Housing Network.

Author: By Bill Radford and Jill Gaebler

Source: https://gazette.com/2026/01/24/rent-control-is-a-failed-housing-policy/