Rent controls, not disaster, caused the postwar housing shortage.

Evidence

The resulting pamphlet, entitled “Roofs or Ceilings?,” argued that the pressing shortage of housing in the immediate postwar period was attributable to distortions in the market structure caused by rent controls. Friedman and Stigler exhibited their argument through a striking analogy, comparing the housing market in San Francisco after the massive destruction of the 1906 earthquake with its housing market in 1946. The housing situation quickly normalized in the period after the earthquake, they wrote, because of the ability to ration the available units through higher rents and the strong incentives those higher rents created to build more units as quickly as possible. In 1946, despite the absence of a comparable catastrophe, the housing situation was dire, a product, they concluded, of the disincentives fostered by rent control. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 420

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: A tight case study in how market-libertarian argumentative tactics work — the natural-order-vs-market-distortion framing echoes the rhetoric category of the austerity project; could support the sacrifice framing in the sacrifice essay as a market-flavored secular counterpart.
• SEED: The Friedman-Stigler earthquake analogy — comparing a real catastrophe to a policy ‘catastrophe’ — is a durable template for how ideologues equate state action with disaster; a short piece could trace this framing device through later Friedman writings.
• XREF: connects to: Postwar modernist building choices were driven by cost and technology, not style ideology — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 468; Postwar housing demand combined family, veteran, and depression fears into reform pressure — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 118

Broader Connections

• Postwar modernist building choices were driven by cost and technology, not style ideology #complicates (0.72) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 468