Rent control did cause SF's housing shortage, but not necessarily in the way you (or economists) would think. New construction isn't rent-controlled, so it's no

Rent control did cause SF's housing shortage, but not necessarily in the way you (or economists) would think. New construction isn't rent-controlled, so it's not a huge disincentive to build: instead, SF's lengthy and ridiculously complicated permitting process manage to do that just fine on their own. This means less housing gets built, and housing prices go up, which is obviously good for those who own housing. Prop 13 helps them too, since they don't even have to pay any extra tax when that happens. But, in a city where a majority are renters, why would the population support policies that make their rent go up? This is where rent control/stabilization come in: these policies mean that restricting new housing has no impact on renters who already live there, either, at least not in the short term and only as long as they don't have to move. The job of rent control is thus to bring (some) renters into the "screw you, I got mine" coalition against housing. You speak of the tech bubble being an exacerbating factor, and you're not wrong, but imagine if SF managed to put all that money to good use by letting developers build new housing. Sure, it'll be full of techies, but the bubble will eventually pop, the techies will move out, and you'll have piles of now-affordable housing. Instead, all that VC money ends up getting funneled into the pockets of the landowning classes.