Joe Salerno talks about it from 34’00" of Price Control: Case Studies :
One of the most interesting let’s say ‘unintended consequences’ of rent control occurred in France, after World War II. France has had rent controls for a long time, on and off from the beginning of World War I. What happened in that case was that the only way - the only way you could find an apartment, was through the black market. In New York you have these black market arrangements. You have people going and bribing the janitor or the superintendent to be placed higher on the list. Or they would charge ‘key money’, they would charge you $2000 for your key, and that was a way of getting around the rent controls.
But in France it went much further than that. There was absolutely no way of getting an apartment. Young couples, soldiers that returned, had to live – when they got married, they had to live with their inlaws, which is not a great thing to do, especially when you’re first married. And so the wife’s full time job was to go around to the local parks in Paris, and find the most sickly looking older person – I’m serious, there’s an article by an economist about this, he’s describing this phenomena – follow them home, and then find out what their address is, and then go immediately to the superintendent (or what they call in French a concierge ) and pay them a big bribe, I think it was $1500 a room or something, to be the first one notified. So then you would immediately move your furniture in - before they were even cold. So as they were carried out, you’d get the call and you’d rush over there. Oh, by the way, rents after World War II were between one dollar and a dollar-fifty. One dollar for a single person, for a family about a dollar-fifty. It’s about between six and eleven packs of American cigarettes at the time, which were circulating also as a sort of quasi-money in France.
So you know, I’m sure that the government’s intent was not to turn Parisians into a city of old ghouls, that sort of follow old people around waiting for them to die- but it happened! I recommend that article. It’s called “No Vacancies”, [36’26] by Bercram de Jubenal - a political economist, actually, who wrote on political philosophy as well as on economics.
I’d like the article, if anyone can find it. I’m not sure about that name.
It’s Bertrand de Jouvenel, not Bercram de Jubenal.
Fun fact, in the post-war period France experienced something it had never seen in its history: the shantytown. It was both illegal to rent and illegal to build, so squatter slums popped up in the suburbs of Paris.
The url gives us a Google Book sample. Some pages of Jouvenel’s essay are missing from the sample.
Anyone still interested in a complete copy of “No Vacancies” can get it in the FEE volume Essays on Liberty, Volume 1 . That’s a table of contents page. There’s a download link for the PDF near the top.
If that old FEE volume looks interesting, the companion volume 2 is here .
