Do Immigrants Equally Benefit from Rent Control?

Abstract

This study examines how immigrants, often concentrated in urban areas and burdened by higher rents, benefit from rent control. We focus on New York City's rent stabilization policy, using high-quality microdata from 2002 to 2017. We find that immigrant tenants face greater rent affordability challenges and are more likely to live in rent-stabilized units than non-immigrant tenants. However, conditional on living in rent-stabilized housing units, immigrants receive $151 less in monthly rent discounts than their non-immigrant counterparts. This notable immigrant-native gap is economically and statistically significant and robust to various checks. In addition, this gap is particularly pronounced among female-headed tenants, highlighting an additional layer of gender disparity. Factors like spatial sorting, tenancy duration, policy awareness, and property characteristics primarily contribute to this disparity.

Keywords: Rent Control, Rent Stabilization, Housing Affordability, Immigrants, New York City