S.F. landlords endorse a politician who wants to expand rent control.

[RandySF]

Former Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin has an appealing political cry for the District 3 residents he wants to represent again: Let’s expand rent control to apartment buildings constructed after 1979.

It’s a far-fetched call that would require unlikely amendments to state law. Forty-six percent of the city’s housing stock is rent controlled apartments, although that number is dwindling. Peskin wants more, he told me.

“San Francisco can’t do this alone… But in terms of people and their lives, extending rent control beyond 1979 is overdue and I’d like to at least start that conversation,” he said.

(His opponent, Julie Christensen, has derided it as a political ploy. “It’s a nice thing to say when you are trying to get tenants to vote for you,” she said.)

Still, it makes one of his latest endorsements in the North Beach-Chinatown race a surprise. The political action committee that represents the San Francisco Apartment Association, a membership group of rental building owners and property managers, voted to endorse Peskin. It's especially surprising given that Peskin and the association have been at odds on nearly every real estate issue that's come before the city for many years.


http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/real-estate/2015/10/peskin-apartment-association-san-franciscoelection.html

[Nye Bevan]

1. Has rent control in SF resulted in good availability of affordable apartments, in practice?

Compared to in cities like Boston where rent control does not exist?

[Bluenorthwest]

3. Boston:

Voters eliminated rent control by referendum in November 1994, and lingering protections for disabled, elderly and low-income tenants finally expired last year.

There were dire predictions of hardship when rent control was abolished. Some of them came to pass. Cambridge (home of Harvard University), which had roughly 16,000 rental units under the strictest regulations in the state, recently reported that nearly 40% of tenants in regulated flats moved out after rent control ended. From a modest survey of 1,000 households, city officials concluded that decontrolled rents overall jumped by more than 50% between 1994 and 1997 (from an average of $504 a month to $775), outpacing market rates. Over the same period, complaints of eviction also rose by 33%.
http://www.economist.com/node/161526

[Recursion]

5. Well, that's like blaming gun control for DC and Chicago's murder rates

You're going to get rent control in cities that recognize already they have a problem with affordable rents.

SFO can mess around with this at the margins all they want (1979 vs. 1993 or whatever) but unless they get serious about either building much more densely or actually investing enough to make Bay-wide transit useful for commuters, they're going to be stuck with this.

[kelliekat44]

2. I don't know the answer but unaffordable rent is a HUGE problem in this entire country...for

individuals as well as small businesses. So much could be pumped into the economy if rents were not so high. And understand that a lot of the rents paid by small businesses is being paid to landlords who are not even citizens and who don't even live in this country.

[Recursion]

4. The answer is to build taller and denser, but SFO doesn't want that

It's a case of fixed supply and for all practical purposes infinite demand. Another option is to make Bay Area mass transit finally work so people can live in the east bay and south of the peninsula and still work in SFO.