>if the landlord believes the market will be that much higher in 4 months

This is a well-founded belief only because demand is increasing faster than supply.

You see this in commercial real-estate, too, where there is nothing like rent control, especially in downturns. in the late aughts/early teens I was looking for commercial space. Being a capitalist, I would target places that had been vacant for over a year, then offer 30-40% less than asking for a 1-3 year lease, with the value proposition being that I'd give them something for the downturn and they could kick me out if things picked up after a few years.

No takers; the real-estate folks thought that prices were going back up and that they'd be better off with empty buildings, primed for when the economy recovered than accepting money from the likes of me.

(The other bit is that rent control is not the whole of this... In california, rent control mostly doesn't apply to anything modern.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa%E2%80%93Hawkins_Rental_H...

You really gotta understand that law to understand this debate; that law is essentially why the poor oppose most of these 'yimby' ordinances; the buildings that would be demolished are rent controlled in SF, and under that law would be replaced by units that are not rent control.

If you don't understand that,the opposition from the poor simply doesn't make sense, because more units, in a free market, wouldn't drive up rents for anyone... but in a market with rent control, if you demolish rent control housing and replace it with market rate housing, you have less housing available for the poor.

(scott wiener and other yimby types often respond by adding a certain number of affordable housing units and/or prohibit tearing down existing rent controlled places. The latter pushes new construction to more commercial/industrial spaces, which if you ask me, is just fine, as it usually means more mixed-use kind of construction)