Rent control in SF, until a state wide rent control bill came into effect at the beginning of this year, only affected buildings with certificates of occupancy or which had residents from before one month in 1979.

Thus there has been, arguably, a big incentive to build new buildings and develop new housing projects, because you could raise rent as much as you want on the tenants.

The thing is, cities are not incentivized to allow more housing because of prop 13 and the amount of tax revenues they get.

Personally I hate the many barriers that prevent San Francisco from creating more it's own new high quality public housing like many places in the EU or basically all of Singapore does. I think if those limits, which are mainly structural and historical, were eliminated, such that the city could make money directly from housing rental instead of solely through property tax, we'd see a very different SF, with well developed well run public housing that everyone would want to live in, instead of the too often poorly maintained public housing concentrated in economically disadvantaged areas.

I'd ask anyone, before they tell me straight off why they think this can't work, to go look up singapore's housing system. Like I definitely could be wrong, but it does appear to be possible.