Namibia stands at a dangerous crossroads. Faced with an undeniable housing crisis, one driven by a chronic shortage of serviced land and formal units, the government is once again flirting with the illusion that administrative decrees can override economic reality. The push for a Rent Control Bill, still present in ministerial legislative plans, is not merely misguided. It is a profound policy error that risks strangling an already over-regulated economy, undermining investment, and worsening the housing crisis it claims to solve.
Rent control is often sold as a compassionate intervention, a quick fix to high rents. But the global evidence is unequivocal: it is a slow poison to housing markets. Basic economics, reinforced by decades of research, shows that when governments impose binding price ceilings below market-clearing levels, demand rises while supply falls. You cannot magic away scarcity by decree. You cannot legislate prices without altering incentives. And you certainly cannot solve a national land and housing shortage by targeting landlords rather than the structural bottlenecks that keep serviced land scarce and expensive.
When rent ceilings are imposed, tenants understandably want more units; who wouldn’t at an artificially low price? But landlords, faced with lower returns and heightened regulatory risk, supply fewer. The predictable result is excess demand: waiting lists, bidding under the table, and landlords cherry-picking tenants. Rent control does not help the vulnerable; it helps the lucky few who get a unit while locking everyone else out.
Global evidence confirms this dynamic with painful clarity. In San Francisco, one of the best-studied cases, the 1994 expansion of rent control triggered a 15% reduction in the city’s rental supply as landlords converted units or redeveloped buildings to escape the cap. The outcome? A 5% increase in overall rents as the remaining units became scarcer. The very law meant to make renting affordable made it even more expensive.
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the story reversed. When strict rent control was abolished in 1994, landlords reinvested in their properties. Units improved, supply expanded, and neighbourhood vitality returned. Across dozens of studies and decades of experience, the conclusion is consistent: rent control benefits a small number of sitting tenants in the short term while eroding supply, quality and mobility for everyone else in the long term.
The economies that introduced it regretted it. The ones that scrapped it recovered. History speaks clearly, if policymakers are willing to listen.
Even closer to home, South Africa’s failed experiment should give Namibia serious pause. The Rent Control Act of 1976 froze rents far below market levels. Over time, incentives collapsed. Buildings decayed. No one built new rental stock because the returns no longer justified investment. The model rotted from the inside out. When rent control was finally abolished in 1999, it was because authorities recognised it had become distortionary and counterproductive.
So why, after all this evidence and so many documented failures, is Namibia contemplating this regulatory dead end?
The answer seems to lie in political temptation: it is easier to blame landlords than to acknowledge the true difficulty because Namibia does not produce enough serviced land, and without serviced land, you cannot produce affordable housing at scale.
The government’s own documents say so. The draft Revised National Housing Policy admits high housing costs stem from “slow and costly delivery of serviced land and negligible affordable formal housing production.” The Ministry of Urban and Rural Development equally warns of a “deficit of affordable serviced land and housing” in urban centres. Windhoek alone faces more than 72 000 households without proper homes. Informal settlements grow not because rents are too high, but because formal supply is too low.
If the bucket is empty, shouting at the price of water does nothing.
Rent control, in the Namibian context, is especially disastrous because it attacks the small portion of the market that is functioning while ignoring the large portion that is not. More than 60% of Namibia’s housing backlog lies among households far too poor to access mortgages or formal rentals. Regulating rents in the formal sector does nothing for families living in shacks in Havana or Tobias Hainyeko. You cannot control the price of a house that does not exist.
Worse still, Namibia is already suffocating under layers of regulation that slow land delivery, complicate development approvals, and scare off investment through delays and uncertainty. Adding another regulatory regime, one that requires rent boards, market data systems, dispute-resolution bodies and enforcement capacity, will only gum up the housing sector further. Even advanced countries struggle to run these systems well. How will Namibia execute a complex administrative regime when local authorities already wrestle with planning backlogs, procurement bottlenecks and strained institutional capacity?
The result will be predictable: fewer rental projects, less institutional investment, deteriorating units, rising side markets and a flight of capital into safer assets. Developers will retreat. Banks will hesitate. Landlords will convert units or sell. And the very tenants rent control claims to protect will face a shrinking pool of formal rentals.
Rent control is a terrible idea for Namibia. It is a distraction from the real solution: unlocking serviced land and expanding housing supply at scale.
Namibia must streamline land approvals, invest heavily in bulk infrastructure and create an environment where private and institutional capital can confidently build rental and ownership units. That is the hard work. That is the real work. And that is the only work that will make housing affordable in a sustainable, long-term way.
Regulation will not build houses. Rent control will not service land. Administrative caps will not conjure supply.
Only bold, supply-driven policy will.
And Namibia cannot afford another lost decade of chasing quick fixes while the real problem deepens.
