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By David Brownell
February 26, 2008
Editor - I appreciated Caille Millner's point in "Keeping those evil chains at bay" (Feb. 25) that San Francisco's rent control legislation has discouraged the building of affordable housing in the city. Economists rarely agree about anything, but almost all agree that rent control is destructive to a city's housing stock. Rent control was put into effect nearly 30 years ago as a temporary measure to deal with the high price of housing. It hasn't. Every year, new measures come along to make rent control stricter or to prevent people from taking economically sensible decisions.
If an owner can't make a return on his investment by renting units out, the owner either takes units off the market, or the owner or a new buyer turns rental units into condominiums. When new rent control legislation tries to make the units remain rental units by severely limiting condominium conversions, the result has been the flourishing of tenancies in common.
After almost 30 years of trying to make water run uphill by legislating that it should, isn't it time to agree that rent control is not achieving any of its objectives? While it does provide some long-term tenants with subsidies, whether they need them or not, at the expense of landlords, whether they can afford to subsidize their tenants or not, it does nothing for the neediest. One definition of insanity is that you keep doing something which has never worked. Does this definition fit the Board of Supervisors?
DAVID BROWNELL
San Francisco
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