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There s another piece of the 1990s puzzle that I see even David Thorns missed. The decision to remove income-related rents was also a response to a Business Roundtable complaint that income-related rents in state housing created unfair competition for private landlords and thus kept rents lower than the market rate (sorry, I don t have a reference for this, but I remember it clearly from an essay I wrote on the subject in 1992). So the expectation, even from the Right, was that removing income-related rents would make rents go up, it s just that they would have viewed the initial increase as a market correction or some other cruel euphemism. The AS was meant to soften the blow of that correction, but I can t imagine they didn t see an associated rent increase as inevitable. I certainly did. Though at the time I think there was some rhetoric about how it wouldn t affect rents because the existence of the supplement would make investment in new rental stock more attractive, o ....