It's hard to fathom how anyone in their right mind could celebrate rent control. It's like putting a positive spin on air raids. Sure the bombs reduced your city to rubble, but at least you have your health.

Rent control is a fossilized throwback to the Jurassic school of urban planning that put its stamp on urban decay. The policy is rotten to the core but the NDP refuse to chuck it.

The Jacobins of rent control justify its reign of terror by pitting tenants against landlords. They say without rent controls, landlords will have tenants over the barrel. Rubbish. Rent control has tenant, landlord and homeowner nailed in a barrel and flung headlong over Niagara Falls.

Rent control is out of control. It rains misery on all walks of life. Even left-leaning civic politicians and school boards trustees bitterly complain how rent control erodes the property tax base and shifts the tax burden on to homeowners.

Another casualty of this ill-conceived price control is the inner city. Plagued by depopulation and disregard, it's become the preferred travel destination for vandals and pyromaniacs. Leave it to the rent control aficionados to blame the slumlords.

Given the chance, any landlord with the slightest savoir-faire would prefer to upgrade a rental unit than leave it to nature to take its course. But artificially suppressed rents dash any hope of sprucing up rental units. The result - tenants get shoddy digs and low vacancies, and landlords get crummy returns on their investment.

Without the cash to build, new rental developments never rise from the blueprint. It's been noted that a decade has passed since the last rental apartment building was constructed.

Worst of all, rent control encourages urban sprawl by submerging rents below natural market values in the suburbs. Faced with the gritty landscape of the inner city and the lure of cheap rents and public housing colonies in the suburbs, lower-income earners join the middle class in the race to the city's outer edge.

If the Doer government is committed to urban renewal, it should let market forces restore dignity and a solid population base to the core area. The NDP should abandon failed public housing ventures in the suburbs and eliminate rent control. Suburban rents will recover and drive people back to low rent inner city housing.

The trickle back affect to the core will do wonders for downtown and neighborhood communities. The incidence of arson and fire attacks will be snuffed out as people repopulate, restore and protect abandoned neighborhoods.

With steady rents and fuller occupancy, landlords will be better positioned to upgrade rental units. The city will get a new look and net greater tax revenues from apartment dwellers. Who knows? The property tax vice-grip on homeowners might actually ease up.

Rent control is a gun to the head of the city. The Province should wipe the law off the books. Central planning initiatives are no substitute for a surefire solution to inner city decay - pull the plug on rent control.