It is now more than seven years that rents have been controlled; the eightyfirst Congress continued general control to the end of June, 1950. Continuation beyond this date is uncertain as this is being written (October, 1949). It is the purpose of this paper to examine the effects of this effort on: (a) the distribution of housing space; (b) the distribution of income; (c) investment in housing; and (d) to appraise the probable effect of the removal of control on these three magnitudes and on the level of rents. The argument rests mainly on theoretical considerations, but empirical evidence is introduced at a number of points. The theoretical analysis of rent control rests on some principles which are quite elementary, indeed distressingly so. They are so obvious that one would feel the greatest reluctance to repeat them on the pages of a professional journal were it not that a great public policy has been erected upon either ignorance or a repudiation of them. If we were to ask a competent sophomore what would happen if consumers' real income increased some 60 per cent while the price of a service of more than zero income elasticity were held constant, we should be justified in expecting him to answer that the quantity demanded of the service would become greater than the quantity supplied and the market would be in disequilibrium. And the sophomore who met our expectations would thereby have uncovered the central element in the housing problem, about which so much has been written and spoken and over which many families have experienced great annoyance and no little hardship. If our sophomore were something more than competent, if he had a touch of affection for the subject, he would go on to express a doubt that much new investment would be attracted to the production of the service in question, that, instead, investment would look for richer pastures in those areas of the economy where maximum prices were not fixed. He might then, warming to the problem (and perhaps seeing an A shimmering before him), go on to say that buyers would engage in a scramble for the service fixed in price with the distribution of it becoming a very haphazard affair. In all this, he would be most correct. But if it then were asked of him whether the theoretical observations applied when rental housing was the service in question, he would, like most members of the human community, draw himself up sharp before the heartlessness of applying the elements of supply and demand analysis to so tender a thing as home and hearth. He would revert to phrases about, Housing is a necessity . . . Rents in a free market would be exorbitant . . . People would have no place to live . .. Landlords would make enormous profits out of the poor. He might so recoil at the thought of free rents that he would go to the library and there discover that the removal of rent control would be inflationary, that it would lead to strikes, that it would reduce the purchases of durable consumer