Abstract
This article studies housing rents in St. Petersburg from 1880 to 1917, covering an eventful period of Russian and world history. Digitizing over 5000 rental advertisements, we construct a state-of-the-art index – the first pre-war and pre-Soviet market data index for any Russian city. In 1915, a rent control and tenant protection policy was introduced in response to soaring prices following the outbreak of WWI. We document official compliance, rising tenure duration, and strongly increased affordability for workers. While the immediate prelude to the October Revolution was indeed characterized by economic turmoil, rent affordability did not dominate.
Highlights
Throughout history, “[w]ar, that prolific parent of legislation, has spawned more rent regulation than any other cause” (Willis, 1950, p. 54)
While early forms of regulation date back to Ancient Rome, World War I constitutes the triggering momentum for the large-scale adoption of rent control policies in modern times
We find that housing rents were quite stable between 1880 and the early 1890s
Summary
Throughout history, “[w]ar, that prolific parent of legislation, has spawned more rent regulation than any other cause” (Willis, 1950, p. 54). Due to the rather low numbers of observations per year and the large geographical variation of rents within St. Petersburg, we include time as well as location (Hill and Scholz, 2017; Waltl, 2016a,b) as smooth, non-linear effects into the hedonic model. All indices identify very similar general trends, but the time-continuous index provides more stable but still detailed information This level of detail is needed to rigorously analyze the impact of the rent control policy.
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