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Comment by optimusclimb | Hacker News Reader

I'm really sick of this notion that rent control is targeted at the poor in SF. It's not. It's targeted at whoever got there earlier.

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.

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The only reason rent control has persisted and protected any poor people into this era is that the program does not select based on class or income, but based on who has been there. There are a larger number of poor people who benefit, and some rich people too. This is why it has not gone away, and continues to benefit those poor people who need it most. Like social security.

If the city wants to target the poor, why not pay housing subsidies based on income?

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.

And then watch rents rise across the city as land-lords queue up for that sweet-sweet subsidy cash.

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.

> And then watch rents rise across the city as land-lords queue up for that sweet-sweet subsidy cash.

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.

The issue is that by providing housing subsidies more money would be put into the demand side of the rental market. This would most likely cause rents to rise as there is now more money to spend.

In this situation the only way out that makes sense to me is to add more supply by removing some artificial barriers to building.

There are programs that make housing available to people based on an income test. My girlfriend's sister and husband (a schoolteacher) have a nice place that I (a filthy capitalist) could never afford on the open market.

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.

I agree with you that rent control fails in all the corrosive ways you describe.

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