Capping rents dampens an essential signal to developers to build more housing units.

It was the most painful moment of Biden’s halting speech to the NAACP on Tuesday: The president complained about corporate landlords raising rents, squinted hard at the teleprompter and said, “I’m about to announce that they can’t raise it more than … $55.”

This was not correct; the administration wants to cap rent increases at 5 percent, not $55. Perhaps an aide had forgotten to hit the shift key when typing the percentage sign into the teleprompter or the president couldn’t distinguish a “%” from a “5.” Either way, it suggested the president had forgotten a key detail of his own policy.

But one can’t blame him for wanting to forget because the policy itself is so misguided. Rent control is one of the worst possible ways to fix America’s housing crisis; it doesn’t just fail to fix the underlying issues but actually makes them worse.

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When rents are high, it’s a sign that too few rental units are available to meet demand. This signal is painful for renters, especially those with low incomes who may hear the message, “You can’t afford to live in this place anymore.” But the same signal is also an SOS to developers: Build more housing! (And to politicians: Lower regulatory barriers to construction.)

Encouraging new supply is the only true solution to a housing shortage because, unless new units are built, every other “solution” — rent subsidies, for instance — amounts to trying to rig a game of musical chairs: The teacher may pick new winners, and maybe we like them better than the last ones, but we’ve still left a bunch of players with nowhere to sit.

And rent control isn’t just ineffective but counterproductive. Trying to solve a housing shortage by weakening the signal that something’s wrong is like trying to lose weight by breaking your scale: You may feel better in the moment, but your problems will probably get worse. In the case of rent control, landlords will decide not to build or operate units that are unprofitable at the capped rents.

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This inevitability can be resisted with various tweaks, and the administration has some of these. What’s being proposed is not a hard nationwide cap but a soft one: The president has called on Congress to pass a law that would force landlords who raised rents by more than 5 percent to stretch out their depreciation allowances over a longer time. The cap........

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