The Green Party has a new plan to solve the housing crisis that is simple: make it worse. With local elections looming, the Greens are set to offer rent controls and various measures against ‘commercial housebuilders’ as part of their local election offer. It is the political equivalent of treating a fever by smashing the thermometer. It might feel satisfying for a moment, but nobody ends up healthier.
At their 2025 conference, the Greens formally adopted a motion to seek what they called the ‘effective abolition of private landlordism’. They want to end buy-to-let mortgages, impose rent caps and build 150,000 social homes a year through public acquisition and council-led construction. It is the most radical housing platform of any party with elected MPs while also being the most economically illiterate. An impressive feat.
Rent controls are one of those policies that sound compassionate in a press release and prove catastrophic in practice. Assar Lindbeck, the Swedish economist, once quipped that rent control is the most effective technique known for destroying a city, short of bombing it. Madsen Pirie, President of the Adam Smith Institute, has wryly retorted that at least bombing destroys supply and demand, meaning rent controls are arguably much worse!
The evidence is not ambiguous. A Stanford University study of San Francisco’s rent controls found that between 1994 and 2010, people in rent-controlled properties benefited from lower rents, but renters who moved to the city later paid an additional $2.9 billion in higher rents. Landlords responded by converting properties to condos, redeveloping or pulling units off the market entirely, reducing the available rental supply by 15%. The policy didn’t redistribute from rich landlords to poor tenants, as intended, but instead transferred housing from new renters and young people to those already housed.
Berlin tried it next. In 2020, the city imposed a five-year rent freeze on properties built before 2014. Within a year, The Economist declared the experiment a failure: rents were down, but the number of classified ads for rentals had fallen by more than half. Researchers documented a substantial and likely lasting decline in the number of rental units, increased conversions of rental properties into owner-occupied flats, a reduction in new construction, and a collapse in the number of properties advertised for rent. Rents in the non-controlled part of the market surged by over 6%, outpacing growth in Germany’s thirteen next-largest cities. Germany’s constitutional court eventually struck the whole thing down.
Stockholm offers the longest-running cautionary tale. Sweden has had rent controls since 1942, and the consequences have been disastrous: in central Stockholm, equilibrium rents are estimated to be 70% higher than regulated rents, creating a shortfall of roughly 27,000 apartments. As of 2019, some 670,000 people were on the housing queue, and one in five young tenants in Stockholm admitted to paying for rental contracts illegally. One woman quoted in reporting on the crisis said she got a rent-controlled apartment after queuing for nine years – and knew few others ‘as lucky’. Stockholm’s ‘housing for the many’ has turned out to be housing for the few.
What makes the hypocrisy sharper is that the Greens are also opposed to the correct solution of supply maximisation. Wherever housing is proposed, Green councillors and candidates tend to discover urgent reasons why it shouldn’t be built.
In Ealing, the local Green Party declared that a proposed 287-home development, which was 100% social rent homes on a brownfield site, ‘is poor and should be stopped’. Why? The buildings were too tall despite the site sitting vacant for six years. In Southend, the Green Party formally objected to the city’s inclusion in the New Towns Taskforce application, opposing development on green belt land and insisting the housing crisis should instead be solved by building on brownfield sites, while simultaneously opposing brownfield development when it appears in places like Hanwell. In Bristol, Green councillors brought a motion challenging the city’s housing targets as ‘unachievable’, warning they could allow developers to override local planning policies.
These eco-trots are BANANAs – Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.
Which brings us to the deeper contradiction in the Green position. The party wants 150,000 social homes a year, which is a target so ambitious it dwarfs anything built since the 1960s. But what is a massive expansion of below-market social housing if not itself a form of rent control? Social housing is, by design, priced through controls at roughly half of market rates. There are already 1.34m households on local authority waiting lists in England. In London alone, more than 323,000 households are queuing, and families can expect to wait over six years for a home with four or more bedrooms. The queue for social housing already resembles Stockholm. The Greens’ answer is more of what isn’t working.
If the Greens were serious about helping urban renters, they would be campaigning for planning reform, for building at density, for ending the bureaucratic stranglehold that keeps housing starts at levels barely adequate for a country half our size. Instead, they’ve reached for the one policy that every first-year economics student learns doesn’t work while blocking the homes that would.
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