Rent control is about not increasing rents by too much each year while you are living there. Once you move out, the landlord can agree to a new lease at any am

Rent control is about not increasing rents by too much each year while you are living there. Once you move out, the landlord can agree to a new lease at any amount. The only way to circumvent this is to assign your lease to the next tenant when you move out. Most people just move out after a while and the apartment goes back on the market. You get some very long term tenants, but so what? It's a small percentage of the population. Given this, I think rent control is fairly ineffective at preserving diversity, but I like it because it means that people can't be forced to move all of a sudden because their landlord puts the rent up by $500 a month. I don't believe that the already astronomical rents in SF would go much higher if rent control was abolished anyway. That said, building more housing obviously helps. As does making nearby cities nicer places to live.