> won't the price skyrocket when things go back to normal?

California adopted statewide rent control as of 1 January 2020. [0] If not already under rent control, rental units older than 15 years are now under rent control.

[0] https://la.curbed.com/2019/9/24/20868937/california-rent-con...

Limited to 5% plus rental inflation, and I'm not sure concessions count towards the rate, so they could still go up substantially within a few years.

who cares? live your dream for 1 or 2 years and move on, or cross your fingers that new opportunities present itself in the denser environment that let you keep up with the rent. If you don't make new friends that you want to be roommates with for lower individual rent, then you end up moving on anyway.

Almost all apartments in SF are rent controlled. The landlord can only raise the rent by some tiny nominal percentage mandated by the rent board every year.

This isn't really true... it only applies to units that were built before a certain year (1979). If you are in any kind of modern unit / luxury unit as noted by GP, then this won't hold.

However, most landlords in non-managed buildings are fairly reasonable about only raising rent 2-5% a year. Your mileage may vary.

That still applies to ~170k rental units, which constitute ~70% of the entire SF rental market.

https://www.spur.org/sites/default/files/publications_pdfs/S...

Then great news, SF has built almost nothing since 1979, so you’re more likely than not to be covered!

Maybe I was being a cheapskate for keeping my rent under $2k per month when I lived there, but I never lived in an apartment that wasn’t rent controlled.

Last stat is read is 30% of units in SF aren’t under rent control. Don’t forget that condos (single unit) aren’t rent controlled even if older than 1979.

For better or worse, landlords have figured out they can renovate the unit (at considerable expense) in order to need get a new certificate of occupancy, which has the upside of considering it to be a 'new' unit for rent-control reasons.

I think rent control laws recently changed, in the last two years; in SF units older than 2005 now fall under standard rent control rules of ~2% per year or CPI increase, whichever is less. Values of properties built in 2005 recently dropped as a result. A couple years ago, rent controlled units were much older.

Source? Is it not 5%+CPI or 10% whichever is lower [0]?

[0] https://sfrb.org/article/summary-ab-1482-california-tenant-p...