Also there's price inelasticity. If you reduce the supply availability by 5%, you don't just get a 5% price increase. For something like housing, gasoline, or illegal drugs (typical inelastic goods) prices could double. That's why San Francisco is so expensive: not desirability, but regulatory corruption pushing down supply of an extremely inelastic product.
I don't know if San Francisco has this problem, but New York has a lot of upper-middle-class, well-connected people who bought their way into rent control by paying "key money" and being named as family by a deceased beneficiary (who need not be related to them). They're now in an arrangement that is actually superior to ownership (because they don't pay property taxes). It's pretty disgusting. People actually used to follow obituaries as a way of finding available RC apartments.
I don't know if San Francisco has this problem, but New York has a lot of upper-middle-class, well-connected people who bought their way into rent control by paying "key money" and being named as family by a deceased beneficiary (who need not be related to them). They're now in an arrangement that is actually superior to ownership (because they don't pay property taxes). It's pretty disgusting. People actually used to follow obituaries as a way of finding available RC apartments.