What? No! Rent control is among other something that can lower the rent for normal people. I know SF has rent control, but currently it only applies as long as you don’t move.
Rent doesn't make housing affordable at all. Ownership does.
Put a plain 2BR in the Mission at, idk, $1500 a month (which Google tells me is a bit over the US median), and you'll have to hold a lottery to figure out which of the ten thousand families trying to get it, actually get it.
Maybe you don't always have a lottery, maybe the big winners are people who were in the right place at the right time as an accident of history. Either way these people are anything but normal. The normal people are the tens of thousands who can't get an apartment at that price. In the end it fails for the same reason that you can't "solve" poverty by running a state lottery and seeing a "normal" person win.
And even if we don't have a problem with this as inherently inequitable, it's just ... such tiny, tiny, small-scale thinking.
EDIT: I know it might seem unfair if you are a landlord or in the housing speculative market. But heck, you’ve had your chance to play a fair game, and seriously screwed us over. You’ve proven your self unworthy as a player in a fair market to a point that you shouldn’t be allowed to play it.
It can decrease your rent if you never move, but that decreases the liquidity of the market, and traps you in a crappy small apartment for longer than you’d live in it otherwise.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/rent-control/
In the real world, places with rent control are the most expensive and have gotten more expensive. It does not help housing prices.
When it does manage to build public housing, SF spends approximately a million dollars a unit to do so. That's purely to get a habitable unit. It includes none of the maintenance costs, which will increase over time, or the social services required to make public housing work as intended.
With that in mind, giving literally 100% of San Francisco's budget to building public housing could produce 12,000 units. That would mean shutting down Zuckerberg General Hospital, street cleaning, street repaving, SFO, schools, and anything else SF does.
Incidentally, the Supes only actually get to control about $3.5bn of that. So now we're reduced to 3,500 units a year... in a city where population growth averages 11,000 people a year. And we still haven't talked about social services, maintenance, or how allocation of what will never be enough public housing units will work.
I think these numbers lay clear that public housing is unlikely to solve SF's housing woes. Don't hesitate to ask if anything is unclear!
Benioff Hospital would be unaffected, but only because it's in no way run by SF.
You are skipping over the part where the government can change the relevant laws that make public housing expensive. Public housing also doesn't have to be built by the government directly so if private construction firms can do it cheaper the government can let them build the housing.
The items that make this expensive have to do with the standards that must be met, zoning and approval processes, and so on. These are things that a private construction firm, under contract with SF, does not find easier or cheaper.
Personally, I like the idea of SF maybe getting in the way of housing construction a bit less. But I also understand that voters seem to like the system as it is. Plus, only some of these laws are readily changed by SF - the plebiscite for public housing law is a state prop from the 70s. Many of the other requirements are also propositions at either state or local levels.
As you say, it's completely true that the government can change the relevant laws. It's just perhaps more subtle than that, as there are multiple levels of government involved and some of the relevant laws are quite challenging to change.
If anything, I would naively expect most of the relevant policies here to be things property developers would be quite strongly against. Perhaps you can enlighten me with critical factors I've overlooked?
The housing projects in the US were implemented in extremely racist ways: segregation, then don't maintain the public housing at all. Public housing for white people in the 1930s was great, then with the red scare, the government decided that subsidizing home ownership would prevent the spread of socialism in the US. It was quite effective, but access to cheap home loans and cheap new developments was racially segregated: only new developments that would be largely white would get the FHA-subsidizided home loans. This is the well-documented "red lining."
This led to the economic segregation where the housing projects were only for Black people, were in areas without access to good schools or jobs. It's no wonder the housing projects failed, because they were largely doomed to failure.
Even in Red Vienna or Singapore, there are still market-rate housing! And the only way they keep the market rate housing low is by having enough housing. Singapore, in particluar, is really good at building tons of public housing. And their policies would horrify all the preservationist fake-progressives in SF, because they just build build build, and do it at heights greater than three stories. And Vienna's public housing would similarly horrify the fake progressives in SF that stop all new housing.
Public housing is great, but if you're looking to see it happen in SF, look to the Mods, not the Progs.
But it's only one, very small, tool in the arsenal to make cities work for the people. It must be accompanied by robust protections to new people as well. The flaw with rent control in isolation is that it assumes that people never move, are never born, and never die, and that cities never change. In order for rent control to be a useful tenant protection, it must be accompanied by robust rebuilding when more people need to live in the city.
Also rent control should not be the only measure. The county should also buy up housing and rent for cheaper to drive the market rate down, price gauging should be illegal (for everyone, not just foreign investors). etc.
Lets say that everything gets converted to rent-controlled in an area. A child becomes 18, graduates from high school, and wants to stay close to their family to maintain their emotional connections. If everything is rent-controlled, but not enough housing is built, they have to be on some sort of waitlist or lottery to stay in the area. This will push out so many people.
The only solution is to make enough housing for the people that want to live in an area. Without that, we are rationing it by price, by lottery, or by waitlist, and all of those will destroy the emotional connections that both you and I want to maintain.
Almost, buying up housing is fine if the government changes zoning and upzones existing properties. It is better to go one tiny step further and make the government guarantee housing for a fixed price because then it is truly forced to fix the problem.
Once you have done this important step the government has many options. It can either fix the demand side or the supply side.
The supply side is easy to fix by changing zoning laws to encourage taller residential buildings and then by actually building them.
The demand side can be fixed by changing the tax law so that commercial property is no longer the only source of property tax income. This lead to an imbalance of commercial vs residential property which then lead to lots of workers without housing which then lead to a race for apartments driving up prices.
And how is rent control supposed to follow tenants? They just show up to a unit costing $3,000/mo and say "my rent control rate is $800/mo, so you need to rent to me at that price." No sane developer would ever build in SF if that is the case, thus exacerbating point #1.