Kamala Harris’s recent embrace of rent control, explained

At her first major campaign rally since becoming the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris made a relatively unexpected promise.

Speaking in Atlanta to a crowd of 10,000 supporters, Harris pledged to “take on corporate landlords and cap unfair rent increases.”

Harris’s remarks to cap rents echoed a recent proposal from the Biden administration just two weeks earlier to limit rent hikes to 5 percent nationwide over the next two years for all landlords who own more than 50 units. (They estimate this would cover over 20 million units across the country.)...