Like one of those horror movie monsters that just won't die, rent control is back.

Five years ago, a contentious statewide referendum abolished rent control, then used principally in Boston, Brookline and Cambridge. It seemed that the stake had finally been driven through the beast's heart.

Today, in the midst of what virtually everyone terms a housing "crisis,'' politicians and activists are talking openly of rent control's resuscitation.

State Sen. Dianne Wilkerson has filed a rent control bill in the Legislature. City Councilor Chuck Turner has proposed what he calls "voluntary'' rent control, while Councilor Brian Honan claims that a majority of the City Council would support a return to the old-style, mandatory rent control.

Boston Mayor Thomas Menino and Charlotte Golar Richie, head of the city's department of Housing and Neighborhood Development, both speak wistfully of rent control as the best answer to the recent upward surge of housing prices. Meanwhile, Boston continues to spend $800,000 a year maintaining the old rent control board (now re-christened the Rental Housing Resource Center), seemingly waiting for the opportunity to reimpose rent control on the city's property owners.

Although it would make activists cringe to hear this, their infatuation with rent control is reminiscent of former President Richard Nixon's boneheaded experiment with wage and price controls 30 years ago.

Nixon, panicked by soaring inflation that seemed uncontrollable, imposed a comprehensive set of wage and price controls in 1971. Virtually all sectors of the economy were covered. Any proposed increases in wages or prices had to be approved by a Nixon-appointed price czar, who literally held the entire economy in his hands.

Politicians and housing activists look at today's housing market with the same panicked eye as Nixon did 30 years ago. The evidence is startling. For example, a typical two-bedroom apartment in Boston rents for $1,400 a month, according to the Boston Tenants'Association, yet an average family can only pay $681.

"There is blood on the streets,'' says Jay Rose, an attorney for Greater Boston Legal Services and rent control advocate.

And just like Nixon, today's policymakers see no solution in sight. The city itself estimates it would need $400 million to help build housing for the 10,000 households it figures need assistance.

The gulf between what the city thinks it needs and what it is capable of doing is vast.

Right now, Boston has allocated a one-time figure of $25 million to affordable housing creation. Just this week, the Menino administration, it what it trumpeted as a major housing initiative, proposed to bump up in the city's linkage payment requirements. Linkage requires some commercial developers to pay $5 a square foot into a city fund. Menino would increase that to $7.18.

Sounds great. But those new payments would amount to a paltry $3.7 million over the next three years.

All of these efforts are no doubt well intentioned. But clearly, the amount of money the city is talking about spending won't solve the problem.

Moreover, even if the money were available, the crisis would remain unresolved. Housing developments take years to site, plan, finance and build. The permitting and community approval process is time-consuming, costly and often fatal to a new project.

So maybe, someday, more housing is built. But the crisis is today, and it is the immediacy of the crisis that makes rent control so alluring.

Rent control is an instant, quick-fix solution. Once imposed, it stops rents from increasing or, if imposed stringently, can even force rents to be cut.

Even better, rent control is kind of a politician's dream. It costs taxpayers nothing. The classic example of an unfunded mandate, the entire burden is borne by private property owners.

The quandary rent control's proponents face, however, is the same one that bedeviled Nixon's successors. Rather than curing inflation, wage and price controls exacerbated it, helping to create a decade long period of stagflation - a combination of slow growth and high inflation - that was devastating to the nation. Ultimately stagflation was cured only when the Federal Reserve imposed the wrenching medicine of a severe recession.

Rent control has the same failing as wage and price controls: It's a short-term measure that in the long run worsens the problem it was intended to solve. The inherent contradiction of rent control is that it discourages new housing creation and rehabilitation, creating shortages and driving people who otherwise might want to live in Boston to seek housing elsewhere. Rent control, ostensibly designed to preserve a residential city, actually undermines it.

That's why it is rare these days to find any respectable academic who defends rent control. Yet it continues to survive as a policy prescription. The reason, unfortunately, is that politicians live their lives in the short term, not the long. As calls and letters pour in demanding a solution, rent control is an easy panacea. The havoc it ultimately wreaks? That will be someone else's problem.

Tom Keane writes weekly for the Boston Herald. He can be reached at tomkeane@tomkeane.com.