You can, of course, revoke owners’ property rights to generate more rental income from their real estate from renovating it. But then you’ll end up with lots of real estate in the decrepit condition we found former Soviet real estate in in the late ’90s. If rich foreigners outbid salaried locals for center city rental apts, it’s up to the government to provide vouchers so that locals can afford to rent those apts. If you suppress owners’ property rights by limiting their returns on upgrading property, the property will stay unrenovated and nobody wins — not owners and not tenants. Rent control on islands like Manhattan, where it’s impossible to make more land, make sense (I’m a real estate investor who had a rental stabilized apt in Manhattan for 16 years). Rental vouchers given to salaried workers so they don’t pay more than 1/3 or 40% of their income in rent, make sense. The same for creators like artists and actors in Manhattan, so that the city isn’t inhabited only by rich financiers, lawyers and corporate execs, also makes sense. But the law of unintended consequences from confiscating real estate owners’ property rights is the one law, and a lose-lose proposition, that can never be repealed. It’s a fact of human nature that no man ever washed a rented car.