NY Times has a heartwarming article on upper-income people who have turned a rent-controlled apartment in New York, San Francisco, or LA into an S&P 500 index fund fortune by investing the savings. I believe Wendy’s own brother was a beneficiary of one of these “rent controlled” windfalls in savings.
Of course, you don’t need to live in a rent controlled city to do this. You just need to take advantage of the opportunities as they present themselves. When I moved to Houston from New York in 1981 as a 25-yr-old I rented a 600 SF apartment for $400/month. When I fled Texas for Washington State in 2006 I was paying less than $600/month for an 850 SF apartment in a comfortable, resort-style apartment complex with palm trees, swimming pools and tennis courts. That likely compares quite favorably with 25 years of rent increases in one of the rent controlled cities.
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