[techtosser1]

While factually partly correct, your explanation of causality is mostly BS.

Rent control in SF was a direct response to Prop 13 and certain landlords enacting disproportionate rent increases. Strict zoning had been happening before prop13 (1978) and still continues to this day based on the desires of each community and how each would like its city planned.

[pjlegato]

"Supply and demand" is not an optional element of city planning that individual communities can choose to use or not use based on their particular local planning desires; it is an objective emergent property of scarcity. The desires of the community to not have the forces of supply and demand at work are irrelevant. All historic attempts to regulate away supply and demand have only made the exact problem they were trying to solve worse, including rent control.

Yes, rent control was intended to alleviate the problem of large rent increases. In practice it has only made large rent increases even worse -- by shifting them from long term tenants onto "people who have moved recently," which does not necessarily correlate with "people who are not long term residents a community." This is precisely the sort of unintended and unforeseen consequence I referred to in my post above. New tenants paying market rate rent are forced to subsidize the long-term tenants' rent. (Besides, it is inherently xenophobic, which is a seperate issue.)

It is a wealth transfer from "people who have moved recently" to "people who have not moved recently." It incentivizes residents to never move, so that they can keep their rent control, and it incentivizes landlords to raise the rents as high as possible when a unit is released back to market rate.

The perverse and unintended effect is insanely high market rate rents, which eventually leads inevitably to the disintegration of the same lower income communities that rent control was designed to preserve, as rental units are inevitably slowly released back to market rate. Poor people sometimes move, too, or die. Young adults moving out of their parents' place can't afford to live in the neighborhood where they grew up. Only much richer people can afford to move in.