Hold onto your wallets. The Colorado legislature appears poised to repeat recent history. Although the 2024 legislative session doesn’t start until January, it seems likely far-left progressives will reintroduce failed bills from last spring during the spring session. Colorado citizens have a right to be worried.

Some of the worst ideas are bad solutions to Colorado’s homelessness, poverty and housing issues. One bill would have centralized unelected control over local municipalities on zoning and land-use restrictions. Another was intended to eliminate unjust evictions but would essentially end month-to-month rentals. Gov. Jared Polis vetoed another bill which would increase direct government interference in home sales and depress property values.

Let’s dig a bit deeper into another one of these bad ideas: allowing local communities to instate rent controls (which appeared as HB23-1115 last session). Denver is the 35th most expensive city for rent in the country, although the city’s rates are 9.1% lower than the surrounding suburbs. The idea of course is to ensure affordable rents and thus keep renters from being priced out or becoming homeless, something everyone of a good heart should desire. But the unintended consequences of rent control are demonstrably bad for everyone.

According to a 2018 study by the liberal Brookings Institution, “While rent control appears to help current tenants in the short run, in the long run it decreases affordability, fuels gentrification and creates negative spillovers on the surrounding neighborhood.”

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Rent control leads landlords to invest less in updating and maintaining their properties since they can’t recoup the costs. Some landlords may convert rentals to higher-priced condos, as happened in San Francisco in the 1990s, pushing local residents out. If rental rates are too low, renters may stay put and not purchase a home, depressing the housing market. And rent-controlled areas reduce the desirability – the value – of other properties in the surrounding area.

None of those consequences are desirable, and the bill authors apparently ignored or didn’t even consider them.

Economist Thomas Sowell warns moral crusaders often do not count the costs of their ideas. He notes, “Advocates of rent control are not judged by the housing shortages that invariably follow, but by their professed desire to promote ‘affordable housing’ for all.” Liberal economist Paul Krugman agrees rent control increases the demand for rental housing while reducing the supply of it – in other words, exacerbating housing shortages.

Progressive compassion for the poor is seemingly boundless – unless the poor want to move in next door. A recent essay in The Atlantic points out that liberal suburbs tend to have some of the toughest zoning restrictions on affordable housing. “Across the country, a lot of good white liberals, people who purchase copies of White Fragility and decry the U.S. Supreme Court for ending affirmative action, sleep every night in exclusive suburbs that socially engineer economic (and thereby racial) segregation by government edict.” Ouch.

So let’s be honest, the progressive desire to enable rent control is bad for renters, first-time home buyers, and property owners. It just doesn’t hurt the wealthy, who perhaps want renters to stay in their current housing and not move to nice neighborhoods. One possible solution to the housing crunch in Colorado is for leafy liberal suburbs to permit more multi-unit development or tiny homes. Don’t hold your breath.

Tom Copeland, Ph.D., is director of research at the Centennial Institute, where he writes on public policy and the intersection of politics, faith and culture. The views expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views of Centennial Institute or Colorado Christian University.