Rent control is a way to mitigate social tension enough so the people on Google buses don't end up with their heads on a pike.
If you are or have ever been in the market for room shares in SF, you'll know there are TONS of professional workers making a decent wage coasting on rent controlled leases that have somehow been passed along for years paying way less than they should be.
I also know tons of professionals making 6 figures+ paying way below market. NOT exactly poor people.
How do you think it is for the young kid hired in to work somewhere that has to look for a place in SF while his boss's boss who probably makes 10s of thousands more pays $1300 a month?
But wait, that never happens...rent control is for poor people. Yeah right.
If you force owners to rent to people at rates way under what they should be getting, you're just making the owners pay that subsidy. When those owners happen to own multiple units, and new ones open up...they pass those subsidies on to the new renters.
Perhaps the solution is to spread the economic activity out from where it is concentrated and build more high-density housing near the economic activity despite ensuing NIMBYism.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. In a direct subsidy to low income tenant world, low income tenants would look the same as any others that could pay the rent.
However, when I've rented apartments, many tenants have requirements for who they will rent to (such as income equal to X times the rent) - and so such a direct subsidy program would probably also need some sort of provision that forces landlords to consider such renters "equally." If anything, I doubt landlords would be queueing up anywhere for the right to rent to such people.
In this situation the only way out that makes sense to me is to add more supply by removing some artificial barriers to building.
Unfortunately it's the stories of people who don't need the help getting away with murder (financially speaking) that make the whole system seem arbitrary and unfair.
This is an old Krugman Op-Ed from 2000 that says exactly that.
When the number of housing units is essentially fixed, rent control instead redistributes the profit from rental unit price increases from the property owner to the renter. And in a renter-heavy city, renters prefer lower-quality units they can afford to higher-quality units they can't.
Poor people move too, all the time, for the same reasons as anyone else. They're the ones who get screwed the most by rent control when they do.
When you move into a new rent-controlled unit, you're subsidizing everyone in all the other properties owned by that landlord who moved in before you. Your personal wealth level has nothing to do with it.
Is it advantageous to the rich, so they can get a minimum-wage cleaner who doesn't have to commute in from Oakland? Meh, I don't think it makes a big difference.
Or is it advantageous to the poor, so that they too can stand in line for a $70 bottomless mimosa brunch every Sunday or buy some nice eighteen-buck cocktails? No, that's stupid, the poor would be better off in a poorer city where (a) everything is cheaper, and (b) they don't have to suffer the indignity of being constantly surrounded by people much more successful than themselves.
No poor people live in Beverley Hills, and it works out just fine for them.
In that regard, it should be noted that San Francisco's much lauded Below Market Rate (BMR) housing program actually accepts only a tiny fraction of the many eligible applicants, by lottery.[1] The actual impact on the poor at large, or on the social composition of the city, are both marginal. It's a lottery. Running a lottery undoubtedly helps the few winners, but it's not a strategy for helping any significant number of people; it's a strategy for making people feel good about themselves for seeming to help people.
[1] For example, the recent Natoma Family Apartments had 60 units available, and 2,800 eligible applicants. If anything, this is an unusually high ratio for San Francisco BMR projects. http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Affordable-housing-in-...