Ding! Rent controls have several adverse effects.
1. Why maintain the property? It’s not earning much. You may not even be able to maintain it if the rents are way way low because you have long time tenants locked in at now ridiculously low rents.
2. Why build rental property if you can’t earn a decent return thanks to rent controls? The result of this is a housing shortage.
3. You give landlords every incentive to try to get rid of long-standing renters so they can charge something approximating market price.
Blame the idiot legislators who imposed rent controls in the first place.
Rent control laws end up having the kinds of adverse effects you enumerated. We have Liberal friends who just sold their five unit Telegraph Hill building in San Francisco. They originally purchased it so that they would have a place to stay when they visited because they live in Nevada. You cannot imagine the hoops they had to go through and the years and bucks they had to “invest” in order to have an apartment in their own building. In the end, thanks to SF’s idiotic rent control ordinance, they had to sell the property because they could not afford the uncovered expenses. Each year, under RC in SF you can only raise rents 60% of what the market shows. That is a recipe for financial ruin. And yet here in this thread we have "conservatives' on the warpath against this landlord for being "un-Christian!" One guy even said he'd not belong to the same church as the landlord. As Pogo said:"We have met the enemy and he is us!"