And that's assuming that if they can't find housing sufficiently nearby, they may also need to find a new job, lose friends, have a harder time staying in touch with family, etc.
I'm not suggesting it's easy to own, but emphasizing that the rental market is a market, and rents change whenever a new contract comes due. If you want to smooth the rates over a long time horizon, buy something or sign a long-term lease.
Unfortunately, rent control fails consistently. It doesn’t change the fact that too many people need too few homes, not to mention the margin squeeze for property owners. The Bay Area needs way more home, especially multi-family units near transportation.
But that doesn’t change the fact that renting is fundamentally unstable, and a short-term contract comes with risks. You seem focused on shooting the messenger.
The relevant issue: Switzerland has rent control (and has had it for a long time). So if it's tenable position for the 2nd richest nation (and has been for a long time), it does suggest that renting being "fundamentally unstable" is not a requirement.
The same individual responsibility for the rental price is on the landlord. If prices rise substantially during their renter's lease period, the landlord is going to pay attention to that. If the rental market increases only a little bit, it is not uncommon for landlords to leave the rental price more or less the same when there is an upcoming lease renewal because it is often more of a hassle (and a risk) to jack the price up, potentially piss off the renter, then they move out, and the landlord now has the new hassle and risk of finding a new renter and possibly going one or more months without revenue.
But in cases where rents rise, say 25% or more in a 1-year lease period, what should a landlord do? Not raise the price for his renter? Leave that money on the table? Or raise the price, run the risk that the current renter cannot afford it, and they either move out or pay.
I'm basically describing normal market behavior. And I think this discussion often devolves into what we often deem to be our "rights" as people. We see the same discussions occurring with healthcare, too, and there are pieces of that applying to housing as well. Renters cannot easily "control" what happens to their supply/demand of rental housing units in their area but when there are large swings, how much "protection" from those swings are people really entitled to?
Perpetual rent controls seem awfully unfair, in my view. There has to be at least some form of rent price adaptation that allows a rental unit to always converge towards its market price if a renter is already living in it.