Our view: Oceanside's mobile homes are a good deal for tenants that rest of North County is paying for

Rent control is great if you got it. For everyone else, rent control only exacerbates housing shortages like that gripping North County. Price caps don't solve the larger problem, but merely create classes of winners and losers —— and the losers always outnumber the winners.

In Oceanside, last week's loser appeared to be John Grant, the owner of Catalina Mobile Estates, whom the city punished for the crime of charging his tenants rents they were willing to pay —— prices that followed the laws of supply and demand but not the city's rent control ordinance.

Grant stands accused of overcharging a dozen tenants at his mobile-home park along the Coast Highway. By contrast, Oceanside and other North County cities with rent control are overcharging thousands of their renting residents and taxing unlucky landowners so that a lucky few tenants can enjoy artificially low rents.

Aren't low rents for poor and elderly people in Oceanside a good thing? Yes, but rent control ordinances supply them to only a sliver of North County's poor and elderly. The mass of renters, rich and poor, pick up the tab; while Catalina residents, for instance, enjoy below-market rents on the pads beneath their mobile homes, the rest of North County's renters make up the difference in inflated rents because the market is just that much smaller. Price caps like rent control always create such shortages.

Rent control also takes wealth from landowners by depriving them of the prices justified by the market. That makes landowners leery of investing in more affordable housing, which in turn makes the housing shortage worse. And shortages push up prices for everybody who wasn't lucky enough to snag a rent-controlled unit.

In protecting some, governments that opt for rent control expose the many to an artificially inflated market.

With rents inching higher as homeownership vaults out of reach for many, the episode stands as a reminder that city councils who turn to rent control end up hurting their poor and working-class residents.