[ryan_lane]

A lot of what you're saying in here is blatantly incorrect or misleading. Water is frequently covered in utilities, but other utilities generally are not. Leases are very specific on the number of people in a unit for rent controlled apartments and is one the few things a tenant can be evicted for. The board frequently approves pass throughs. Increases tend to be higher than inflation.

If you lease out your house and you want to take back ownership, yeah, you need to pay out the tenant and that's completely fair. You're upending another family's lives, and they may not be able to afford to stay. You're paying them moving costs and covering a period of time of adjustment for them. If you think this is unfair, you have poor morals.

Also, for good measure: fuck the landlords.

[refurb]

You need to do more research.

The rent increase law is 60% of CPI. Look it up.

SF introduced a new law a couple years ago that additional people can live in a unit even if they are not on the lease. They only instituted caps on how many. Google search it.

Plenty of apartments have not only water, but also heating included in the rent. If that goes up drastically, the rent board will likely tell the landlord “tough”.

And I’m not against buying out tenants. I am against them having to pay $100,000 or more.

----

Sources:

This amount is based on 60% of the increase in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers in the Bay Area, which was 4.4% as posted in November 2018 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.[1]

Legislation that went into effect November 9, 2015 allows tenants covered under rent control to add occupants, if reasonable, despite restrictions in the rental agreement.

[1]https://sfrb.org/sites/default/files/Document/Form/571%20All... [2]https://www.sftu.org/roommates/

[irq11]

You need to exaggerate less.

The maximum rent increase rate is 60% of the trailing twelve months CPI in the bay area. But landlords’ costs do not scale with the CPI. Mortgage rates are fixed (if a landlord has a mortgage at all), taxes are independent of CPI, and principal+interest+taxes are the vast majority of a landlord’s expenses. Maintenance is typically a small fraction of that number.

Landlords are not obligated to pay your heat or water under rent control. Mine certainly never did.

The roommate law changes you mention are not rent control, but tenant protections applicable to all rentals in SF. The 2015 change brought rent controlled units up to par, because landlords were evicting people for doing things like getting married or switching roommates (horrors!) Basically: preventing predatory landlords from being scumbags.

I’m going to go with the GP on this and say that if you think people should have their rent hiked for getting married or changing roommates or having a kid, you have poor morals.

In essence, you don’t like being told what you can do, you have a theory that it hurts the housing market, and you’re inventing reasons to justify your theory of reality.

[refurb]

Exaggerate? I said it was 60% of CPI and it is. Yes, the mortgage is likely fixed, but expenses such as maintenance and other associated costs are not - renovation cost have gone through the roof the last 10 years. Maintenance is generally 1% of the value of the building, so in SF that can be tens of thousands per year.

No, landlords are not obligated to pay heat or water (I never said that!), but many buildings (all the ones I lived in) do not have separate meters for water and sometimes heating, the landlord just pays the bill. Rent to a single person and they have two other people move in and use 200% more water? Tough shit says the rent board!

And the other problem with allowing additional people to live there is that if those additional people can demonstrate that they were an "established tenant", then they get full rent control and tenancy even after the original tenant (only name on the lease!) leaves. Show the rent board the lease they signed? Tough shit says the rent board.

It sounds like you aren't that familiar with the tenant laws in SF, so I'm not surprised you don't think it's a problem. Suffice to say being a landlord in SF is not a very attractive proposition, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that we have a housing shortage.

[irq11]

Well, now that you’ve agreed with everything I wrote, you’re stuck with arguing trivialities: landlords are failing en masse because of maintenance, water, roommates, etc.

Math lesson: If my mortgage is $X (which I more than cover with my rents, since to do otherwise would indicate that I am a phenomenally stupid real estate investor), and I pay .05X per year in maintenance, the total annual increase in costs is currently CPI x .05 x X.

I don’t know if you noticed this while you were becoming an expert on SF landlord tenant laws, but 0.6 x CPI x X is bigger than that number. The annual increase in rent is literally 12x larger than the thing you’re complaining about. Room left over for taxes and evil, deadbeat babies, even.

In other words: as long as maintenance, water, taxes remain a small percentage of the mortgage+principal, the allowable rent increases more than cover the inflated costs. It’s almost like they designed the law that way!

Again: you’re just trying to find reasons to justify your opinion, and you’ve done a bang-up job of demonstrating what I originally wrote: people irrationally demonize rent control in SF.