I don't know about you, but I came away from last night's debate on rent control at Town Hall feeling rather disappointed. Neither side destroyed the other. There was a lot more repetition of talking points ("Rent control impedes the construction of new housing!" vs. "Rent control is the only thing standing between you and an eviction!" over and over) than crushing arguments based on citations of real-world data. (If you missed it, you can watch below.)

But Republican state house representative Matt Manweller made a baldly-faced false claim which deserves a smackdown: Every city that has tried rent control has later rejected it.

Gobsmackingly, the pro-rent control side—Council Members Kshama Sawant and Nick Licata—did not, in response, cite a 2009 study by the Social Science Research Center at California State University, stacking in at 400 pages (PDF), of Los Angeles' rent stabilization ordinance (RSO).

On balance, the study recommended that L.A. should "retain the current scope of coverage by the Rent Stabilization Ordinance and provide technical assistance workshops and other training focused on small owners."

The Los Angeles ordinance is a common sense kind of rent regulation (to be clear, rent stabilization is generally considered a second generation form of rent control) that ties rents to the consumer price index, sets up a city council-appointed rental adjustment commission, and asks landlords to justify significant rent hikes (for renovations, for example) to the commission. It's not a hard, across the board cap on rents.

The L.A. ordinance covers 66 percent of the city's rental housing stock.

The study of that ordinance is the most recent, comprehensive, thorough, non-ideological examination of an existing, broad-based municipal regulation of rents that I can find. It surveyed thousands of tenants and landlords.

It said that rent stabilization is no silver bullet, and identified areas for improvement. In fact, L.A. ranked as one of the country's most unaffordable cities in 2014.

But it recommended keeping the RSO in place and the law, which dates back to 1978, remains on the books. Manweller was either lying through his teeth, or, more likely, ignorant.

The Cal State study found that the RSO "protects" thousands of low-income tenants "against rapid rent increases and arbitrary eviction."

It found that small owners—landlords who rent out 2 to 4 units—had difficulty maintaining profit margins under the RSO, but they needed to be assisted, not exempted, because they rent to many of the city's poorest residents. Under Seattle's $15 minimum wage law, small business owners with tighter margins were given more time in which to phase in the wage increase. One could write similar accommodations for small-time landlords into a Seattle RSO.

"The CPI [consumer price index] annual increase standard fairly balances the interest of renters and owners," the study found.

Can the private market, unfettered by cumbersome government regulation, solve the housing affordability crisis on its own? "Data in the previous sections shows that the private market, alone, will not produce housing within the reach of a majority of renters," the L.A. study concluded.

Did the RSO prevent landlords from turning a profit? "Almost two-thirds of RSO units produced a profit or broke even... and slightly over a third had a loss," the study found. The bigger the landlord, the more likely they were to be profiting.

Here's last night's debate, but if you want to use your lifespan efficiently, or prefer the straight facts, I suggest you start with the L.A. study and go on from there.