Rent Control Creates Higher Rents in SF
Rent control causes all kinds of bad effects.<p>As noted by others here, it discourages maintenance and property improvements to rent control units. The landlord has an incentive to create a terrible living situation to get the tenant to move out.<p>It also reduces tenant mobility. If you're a long time renter and have a great, but maybe just affordable to you, rate, and then have any life change where you'd normally want to move, you face a tough decision. Get a new job, want to move in with someone, have a baby, need to take care of a parent, sell or buy a car, etc... and when you would like to move, instead you're stuck.<p>Rent control also directly causes Ellis Act evictions, IMO. If your building has occupants who've been there for a while then you're getting much lower income than market rate. One way to retrieve the true value out of the property is to sell it someone who will convert to private residence, thus valuing the property much more than a landlord.<p>Rent control is a subsidy to renters paid by landlords. They bear almost all of the financial responsibility for this attempt to make housing affordable. Home owners don't, and employers and employees don't. And the subsidy is incredibly unevenly applied: You get more a subsidy the longer you've been in a rental, it's not dependent on how much you need the subsidy.<p>As long as the city deems it beneficial to have a rental subsidy, they should just go ahead and have a real subsidy paid by taxes, and get rid of rent control. There's a good argument that a diverse population is good for  the the city, so a subsidy funded by income, sales, corporate, property, and hotel tax makes a lot of sense.