[hoprocker]

> About 33,000 of these were vacant, generally as a side effect of rent control laws. (I don’t honestly know if rent control is a net good or bad thing—I assume more good than bad—but it certainly keeps units off the market.)

If I understand it correctly, one of the most common ways of evicting rent-controlled tenants is through owner move in. A side effect of this is that the owner has to "live there" for 3 years[0]. Given this, it seems like this statistic -- which, taken out of context, could be used to demonize rent-controlled units as wasting valuable housing stock -- is actually forced on the short-term rental market by profit-seeking landlords.

[0] http://www.sfrb.org/index.aspx?page=965