[jonpaine]

Am I misunderstanding you?

SF's legendary rent control creates a clear incentive for landlords to use a service like Airbnb to continually rent at market rate (though lower occupancy rate) while maintaining control to allocate the unit as they see fit. Renting a unit in sf both freezes rental revenue and removes the owners control to reallocate the unit.

Did you mean something else?

[jedberg]

Even with rent control it's still better to be a landlord of a long term tenant than follow the licensing restrictions. The license 1) Costs money and 2) limits the number of days you can rent.

#2 is the big issue. Even with rent control, at least you can rent the place out for the whole year. With the license you can only rent the place out for 90 days a year. You must live in the unit the other 275 days of the year. So your rent controlled rate would have to be 25% of market rate for the legal short term rental to make sense, and you'd have to live there when it isn't rented.

[ap3]

Why don't more people rail against rent control like they do airbnb?

How many people live in rent controlled units in SF?

[dragonwriter]

> Why don't more people rail against rent control like they do airbnb?

I've seen more people -- on HN and in real life -- railing against rent control than against AirBnB.