To be clear, this is a 20 year old article, the literature on rent control has changed a lot since this was written. Basic economic consensus rn seems to be that rent control is a poor long term solution to rising housing costs but a necessary short term solution as the required supply shock wouldn't even be able to happen in the near term even if regulatory barriers are eased due to labor, construction, and land costs in expensive metros and that the anticipated negative impacts of rent control (less liquidity in rental market, higher prices) dwarfed by the impact of lack of supply.
It’s a 20 year old story about rent control in San Francisco. So, we are talking about a long term problem?
“ A few months ago, when a San Francisco official proposed a study of the city's housing crisis, there was a firestorm of opposition from tenant-advocacy groups. ”
yes, and there was a huge well funded study a few stanford professors conducted of rent control in SF in 2018 that is a much more accurate study of the affects of rent control policies.
"Rent control appears to help affordability in the short run for current tenants, but in the long-run decreases affordability, fuels gentrification, and creates negative externalities on the surrounding neighborhood."
To be clear, the rent control studied was a yearly rental increase of ~2/3 CPI, or 1-2% annually, while market rents increased at about 7% annually since the 50s in SF. The proposed policy is a rent cap of around 8%, which is higher than the aggregate rent increase in the SFBA over the past 30 years or so (also 7%). This isn't a rent control law as much as it is an anti gouging law, disallowing landlords from increasing rent 10-20% YoY, which happens to maybe 1-3% of the market.
its a great solution for people who's landlords are price evicting them by raising their rents by 25%. This law will allow people 2-3 years to find an alternate living arrangement compared to the 30-60 days they have today.
If I were to guess, this bill will likely be positioned as a long-term solution and the other bit where housing supply is addressed will go largely neglected.
Which is, coincidentally, an apt summary of San Francisco's housing policy for the past twenty years.
So does this bill automatically expire at some point? If not, why not? Not many laws are easily repealed as the side effects they create work to entrench them in society. A bad person is a person that think they can engineer other people's lives for the better through legislation.
