Having suffered under Rent Control for years.....I've also witnessed the increase in housing that it's abolition created.
Rent control illustrates a very common fallacy in people's understanding of economics. They perceive markets as a contest between suppliers of goods and services, who try to raise the price as much as possible, and consumers, who try to lower the price as much as possible. They perceive that things like rent control help the "consumers" of property, while things like minimum-wage laws help the "suppliers" of labor. Unfortunately, their view of the "contest" is entirely wrong.
In reality, suppliers compete against suppliers and consumers compete against consumers. Suppliers would like prices to be high, and consumers would like them to be low, but in reality only suppliers can increase prices and only consumers can lower them. What rent control and minimum wage laws do is to prevent "consumers" of property from increasing prices, or "suppliers" of labor from decreasing them.
If there is a shortage of certain goods in a market, some people who want goods can increase their likelihood of getting them by offering more money than other people. In an open market, it is these buyers, rather than the sellers of the goods, who are responsible for the increase in price. The function of "anti-gouging" laws is to remove these buyers' competitive advantage over other would-be buyers.
It's interesting that markets are so often seen as having buyers in competition with sellers, when the reality is in fact the opposite.