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Re:Rent Control Creates Higher Rents in SF by timr on Wednesday March 18, 2015 @02:50AM (#9223990)
Wait...what is this "subsidy" you speak of? My landlord's costs are mostly fixed. I pay the same portion of the mortgage that I did when I moved in here -- and it's not like I'm paying a tiny amount of money, either. I'm subsidizing my landlord, not the other way around.

My landlord's inability to exploit me at optimal efficiency to pay for her income-generating asset is not a subsidy, it's just a policy decision in favor of tenant's rights.

Re:Rent Control Creates Higher Rents in SF by tptacek on Thursday March 19, 2015 @12:48PM (#9233143)
Your landlord's costs are fixed --- modulo property taxes, which rise with the appraised value of the property --- but the value of the property fluctuates with the market. In San Francisco, that market is skyrocketing. Your rent should be too. It isn't: due to rent control, you capture the upside (below-market rent) instead of your landlord.

Respectfully: you are practically the poster example of the problem with rent control in a supply-constrained and rapidly gentrifying real estate market. Working class families get moved out of the city. That happens; it's part of economic growth. Meanwhile, a policy that should serve first and foremost to protect the interests of the least mobile workforce participants instead protects an elite startup founder at their expense.

Someone who wanted to make a case against SF rent control could literally just point at you. "We're distorting the housing market for the benefit of elite tech workers. We should stop doing that."

I don't blame you for accepting rent control. You're a rational actor, the option was available to you, and if you want to commit charity, there are probably more efficient vectors for that available to you than enriching a landlord. But I don't think your experience is a particularly good illustration of the public policy benefit of rent control.