This article sounded reasonable until I got to this:<p>>Remember Barbara, she of the 70 sub-tenants? She spent 40 years “as a local artist specializing in clay pots and stoneware”. While I’m sure her pots are nice, there may have been better uses for this unit, three blocks from the FiDi, during SF’s finance, legal, and tech booms over the past few decades.<p>What entitles finance, legal, or tech folk to that apartment over pottery artisanry?
Fascinating read. I've always maintained a position of being staunchly in favour of rent control, but hadn't considered a city could get it so ass-backwards as it sounds like San Francisco has.<p>In Vancouver, we have a housing crisis as well, but our rent control more or less makes sense: Landlords <i>can</i> raise rents every year, but up to a maximum allowed percentage which varies every year but (to my knowledge) is no more than 3-4% in any given year. If the leaseholder leaves, the lease is effectively over. Leases can't be transferred or reassigned (which does end up biting people sometimes when one of the people on a lease wants to leave, ending the lease and triggering an increase for the other person)<p>I'd take this any day over what would happen if we didn't have any rent control... even if initial rents on moving into a place might be roughly the same, renters as a whole would end up paying much more over time.
This is the reality in most rent-controlled areas, I supppose. Germany for example has very strict property rental laws. Unlimited contracts only save for rare exceptions, cannot evict a tenant unless you want to move in yourself (and even then cities such as Berlin defer this right by the legal maximum of 10 years for properties that change owners), can't raise rent while the contract is in force unless it's been written into the contract from the beginning. And a place that's rented out to someone new has a capped maximum rent increase in comparison to the previous tenant.<p>Renting out property in Berlin is gambling. You have to bet on who is at the same time the most financially stable and the most likely to stay in your place medium-term, so that you can re-rent the place reasonably often to game the system the most. Yuppie families or single professionals have a winning hand here.
The problem as per the article is that the early renters are cornering a significant fraction of the increased SF real estate profits. It is implied that justice would demand that all the profits be allocated to the owner, not the renter even if he has been renting for 45 years.<p>It is a well established principle of capitalism that owners are entitled to all of the profits from the real estate equity, even if the owners did not contribute to the silicon valley boom over the past 40 years, which was primarily boosted by the renters/engineers who moved into the city.<p>The injustice here is that the old time renters are partaking in the profits which they are not entitled to.