Rent control is trumpeted as some sort of protection for low-income people, but it actually has no such provisions that make it available to, or targets such people. The only beneficiaries of rent-control are people who happen to be incumbent residents.

Also incumbent landlords who are sitting on paid off properties. A landlord with an old building has less vacancies if he doesn't have to compete with new construction.

That doesn’t make sense to me. If a landlord wanted the advantages of low vacancies due to low rent, why not just lower the rent?

They also need to maintain resale value when they decide to let the property go. These are investment vehicles first. Homes second.

I'm not sure it works that way. I'm no landlord, but property tax is not subject to rent control reductions as far as I know. The primary beneficiaries of rent control are the people who are the renters, and are often able to extract value out of it from buyouts in the tens of thousands of dollars to as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In a city like SF, vacancies is not a thing. Actually for that matter, in any market the market price is some equilibrium price that gives a certain vacancy rate.

Much if its value is in protecting existing communities who would be displaced by rising rents, so yeah, it favours incumbents.

I think existing communities is interchangeable with incumbent residents. There are probably better ways to protect mass displacement of low-income residents since rent control only applies to certain really old buildings. Preserving the community in itself is not a bad thing to do but a lot of these policies have also been blocking the building of higher density housing, which could satisfy everyone (keep old residents AND let in new residents).

...who are low/fixed income at the time.

"Affordable housing" is a completely separate issue.

Someone did a study on this in SF. You can probably google it.

As you mention, a significant percentage of tenants with rent control would be regarded as "high income" households.

Hell, I know a guy who has a rent control units for a couple decades. He can pay his monthly rent with one day's take-home pay.

> Hell, I know a guy who has a rent control units for a couple decades. He can pay his monthly rent with one day's take-home pay.

It sounds outrageous, but I know someone like that too. Got a rent controlled box in Berkeley as a student, never left. Rent is only about $700 a month now. If you make $180,000 a year, that's a single day's pay.

Yup. I remember people telling me this when I first moved to SF. The rent may suck, but if you get a rent controlled place, a few years later you’ll be paying below market and the economics start to make more sense.

In NYC, there remain a vanishingly small number of rent controlled apartments, and for every lucky lottery winner there are hundreds/thousands who lose housing/capital/possessions at the mercy of owners.

Not to mention the homeless.

Don't get me started on the housing "market" and rent control impact on supply/demand. Housing is largely an adversarial game, not a win-win game.

Only if you cannot build. If you can expand units its most definitely a win-win game.

You don't need to bet, there is plenty of data to back that claim. The biggest beneficiary of rent control are middle-class earners with artificially low rent. The low-income and retired renters are ancillary beneficiaries.

Here is one of many papers: http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~jkbrueck/course%20readings/gyourk...