Rolling windows, closed doors: Mobility and tenure effects of Oregon’s statewide rent stabilization policy

Source abstract

This paper examines the causal effects of Oregon Senate Bill 608 (SB608), the first statewide rent stabilization law in United States history, on residential mobility and homeownership. Exploiting the law’s age-based exemption, which excludes buildings younger than 15 years from coverage, I use a rolling window difference-in-differences design applied to 580,897 ACS household observations.I find that rent stabilization reduces residential mobility in covered buildings by11–27 percent relative to pre-policy baselines. Covered buildings also exhibit relative increases in homeownership of 5–6 percent. These effects emerge despite SB608’s comparatively permissive rent cap (7 percent plus CPI), suggesting that landlords and tenants respond to the existence of a stabilization regime even when caps do not immediately bind. These findings extend prior city-level evidence to a statewide setting and reveal unintended consequences for housing supply and tenure composition.