You were (from your bio) one of the first engineers at Justin.tv (now Twitch.tv), a search and data mining engineer at Yelp.com, and a founder of Vayable, a YCombinator-funded startup.

You're comfortable with the idea that you get rent control? The market has been set up to essentially subsidize you, at the expense not only of the evil landlords but of all the potential SF tenants who do not get rent control, many of whom are (I can only assume, but it seems a pretty safe guess) far less economically secure than you are.

I'm sorry to personalize it like this (I'll forget your name soon after I write this comment). I really don't mean this as an attack. I'm just pointing out that you're a member of an undeniably elite class of worker, one that is essentially inheriting most of the economy (I believe "eating" it is the verb our industry prefers) and --- no moral judgement here --- displacing previous residents from the old outmoded economy. I'm a little startled to hear you suggest that you need a subsidy.

Wait...what is this "subsidy" you speak of? My landlord's costs are mostly fixed. I pay the same portion of the mortgage that I did when I moved in here -- and it's not like I'm paying a tiny amount of money, either. I'm subsidizing my landlord, not the other way around.

My landlord's inability to exploit me at optimal efficiency to pay for her income-generating asset is not a subsidy, it's just a policy decision in favor of tenant's rights.

Your landlord's costs are fixed --- modulo property taxes, which rise with the appraised value of the property --- but the value of the property fluctuates with the market. In San Francisco, that market is skyrocketing. Your rent should be too. It isn't: due to rent control, you capture the upside (below-market rent) instead of your landlord.

Respectfully: you are practically the poster example of the problem with rent control in a supply-constrained and rapidly gentrifying real estate market. Working class families get moved out of the city. That happens; it's part of economic growth. Meanwhile, a policy that should serve first and foremost to protect the interests of the least mobile workforce participants instead protects an elite startup founder at their expense.

Someone who wanted to make a case against SF rent control could literally just point at you. "We're distorting the housing market for the benefit of elite tech workers. We should stop doing that."

I don't blame you for accepting rent control. You're a rational actor, the option was available to you, and if you want to commit charity, there are probably more efficient vectors for that available to you than enriching a landlord. But I don't think your experience is a particularly good illustration of the public policy benefit of rent control.

Hey, I am too, though I recently moved so I got hit with the reset.

I guess you're just ignoring the part where no rent control and direct subsidies would lower the prices of the available rental stock. Do you like being penalized for moving? I don't.

Yes, I'm ignoring your completely unsupported hypothetical about subsidies.

You don't need to invent fancy theories to explain rents in SF: we're in a demand bubble, driven by the influx of venture-funded tech companies into the city. This is neither new, nor surprising.

I totally agree that we're in a demand bubble, but it's exacerbated by rent control and the historical difficulty of building new units.

This isn't a very fancy theory, it just effects supply and demand. I don't think you'll find many economists who would disagree with the assertion that rent control reduces supply, thus driving up prices. That reduction is caused by people incentivized to stay in a unit when they otherwise might have moved.

Exacerbated by how much? Is the effect bigger or smaller than the huge, obvious and clearly explained demand changes over the past few years?

Well the landlord benefits from Prop 13 which is basically "rent control for property owners", so the landlord should really forward that pie and letter of gratitude to the California taxpayers who are subsidizing him.