La intervención pública en el mercado del alquiler de vivienda: una revisión de la experiencia internacional

In recent years, residential rental prices have experienced remarkable growth in much of the major metropolitan areas of advanced economies. These increases in rental prices, on certain occasions, have caused a significant increase in the cost of renting housing in the household consumption basket and difficulties in access to housing in certain groups. In this context, there is a resurgence of the debate about the role of public policies in the housing rental market designed to mitigate both the problems of access to housing and the potential negative effects of the growth of rental prices on workers’ mobility or in the macro-financial stability of the economy. In this document, we review the main instruments of public intervention in the residential housing rental market in the light of international experience, related to the main advanced economies. Broadly speaking, the different policies can be classified into three main groups: rent controls, the public provision of rental housing and a wide range of heterogeneous measures aimed at both incentivizing the private offer of rental housing as to contain the increase in household spending caused by the increase in rental prices. The experience accumulated during decades in the development of these policies and the increasing availability of quantitative evaluations of the impact of these policies allows to illustrate some of the implementation challenges presented by the residential rental support policies as well as the desired and unwanted consequences associated to this type of interventions.