I generally agree with you, but would argue that in this case evidence suggests that building housing in the bay area is extremely difficult given the local government situation and how it leads to all local areas incentivized to not allow development while the larger group as a whole would benefit from it. This is why I tend to think the only way to fix this is at a higher level (like SB827) where you can avoid some of these affects by coordinating for the entire state.

I understand that this doesn't solve the issue of long term residents who can't afford current rent so I think reasonable people can disagree about this issue. I just tend to think that the negative affects of rent control outweigh that benefit.

The negatives being:

- Creating a bimodal market where new comers have even more extreme rents to subsidize the rent controlled units

- Landlords incentivized to do the absolute minimum maintenance because they want their tenants to move out so they can increase rent to market rates.

- Developers less interested in building units if renting them will be market controlled and ROI is less certain.

- People living in rent controlled units caring less about housing getting built.

Rent control seems to only help existing tenants - with high levels of immigration to the state it probably causes more problems overall.

I agree with your point that it's about political will, but I think rent control reduces some of that support for building housing (and creates a large contingent extremely in favor of never removing rent control).