In S.F. there might be.

In Manhattan too.

S.F. and Manhattan are both geographically limited ultra-high-price islands within larger metro areas (and of course people can move in and out of entire metro areas in response to price too), which, among other things, seems like it should make the market more complex than a simple supply-demand curve from a micro-economics 101 textbook.

There are. There are far more than enough, because...

> Rent controls push the average rent down temporarily (until supply drops to regain equilibrium)

... there isn't enough supply to meet demand. There are literally _not_ _enough_ _apartments_ for the people who want to come into the city. There hasn't been enough supply to meet demand in SF for at least ten years. What little is being built will come nowhere close to meeting this year's influx, let alone next year's.

In almost any other city, I would agree that rent controls are obscene. Here in SF, rent controls don't go far enough. Units built before 1970-mumble should not reset to "market rate" upon vacancy.

"Want to come into the city" isn't a yes/no proposition. How much are those people willing to pay to come into the city?

I'm sure there are plenty of people who are living in SF right now who are not willing to pay $3000 to live there. Lucky for them, they don't have to, because their rent is controlled at a lower price than that.

In a free rental market, you would see some current SF residents leave because they're not willing to pay market rates, but the market rate would drop as a result. In other words, long time residents would move out to make space for the people who want to move in and are willing to pay for the privilege.

I don't get why there's so much agreement here that that's the desirable outcome. Allowing people to be quickly, dynamically uprooted out of their homes as price volatility swings up and down in different areas -- that has a lot of real human (read: economic) costs associated with it that are not obviously to account for. For example, the difficulty that children will face by being uprooted from their schools and friendships.

Obviously the cost-benefit of any particular program requires very careful analysis, but I think there's quite some value in the idea of stabilizing rent to allow people agility to make the appropriate life changes that correspond with changing housing.

I never claimed that it was. I was just refuting the claim that removing rent controls would result in everybody paying the pre-rent-control-removal market rate.

I'm not sure that's the case. For me, at least, I believe there are better ways than rent control to keep people of lesser means in their homes. A benefit of finding one of those means, and killing rent control, would be that the lower median rent would also benefit people of higher socio-economic status who feel the crunch but wouldn't be eligible for low-income housing.

So your argument is that the people who can't afford the asking price would move out, and the people who can afford that rate would take their place, and the net result would be that market rate would go down? Um.

What you mean to say is that market rate would go down for the average new arrival. But why should anyone who already lives here care about that person? Because they work for a startup?

I was taking the words "market rate" to mean "rate negotiated by people operating at arms length" as opposed to "rate dictated by government without any negotiations having taken place". But yes.

But why should anyone who already lives here care about that person?

They don't. And that's exactly the problem with rent controls: They benefit the current local residents at the expense of future residents, and hurt society as a whole. It's the same problem as property tax controls (current owners pay lower rates than future owners) and union seniority rules (current union members get paid more than future union members), which is why some states have laws prohibiting rent control in spite of the desire by local governments to impose it.

One man's problem is another man's social policy. I don't see this preference as anything more than a societal decision to give some value to social stability.

[0] To the knee-jerk downvoters: look up the demographic stats for those districts before you downvote. :)

timr has it right on the nose. The only way what you propose works is if that market (or nearby markets) is not supply-constrained.