It’s also keeping a lot of homeless people out on the streets and forcing others to commute from Stockton.

You’re either lucky on the inside, or completely shit out of luck.

Rent control is the system by which a new married couple spends $3K to rent a 1 bedroom while an incumbent renter who has been living in the same unit for 2 decades is paying $900/month for a 2 bedroom apartment in the same building. Only one of these is "kept safe", the other is exploited, effectively subsidizing the long term renter. In this sense, it's very similar to Prop 13, where two identical houses are charged very different property tax rates, based on how long the current occupant has owned the house.

Both of these systems are widely regarded as unfair by everyone other than their beneficiaries (e.g. long term property owners for Prop 13 and long term renters for rent control).

Both of these systems end up raising prices for newcomers, so that old timers are subsidized (newer home sales have Prop 13 benefits baked into higher asking prices, just as newer rental contracts have rent control benefits baked into much higher rents).

Nothing prevents a landlord and tenant signing a contract in which future rent increases are controlled for a long period of time while allowing the tenant to move out whenever they want. Obviously such a contract would require a higher asking rent than a contract in which the landlord had the option of raising the rent after 1 year. This is because the former contract has an embedded option value that the latter contract doesn't. Thus rents in rent control cities are always higher than the same rents would be without rent control.

That doesn't mean that there isn't a (small) population of incumbent renters who massively benefit from the option, even if a larger group of renters loses from the option. Like any lottery type system, those who end up being able to stay in the same place are winners and the other renters are losers.

This situation creates massive transfers from a majority of the renter population to a small minority of very long term renters, just as Prop 13 creates massive transfers from new home purchasers to long time owners.

The issue is why the city makes it illegal to have any other kind of contract. Most renters suspect they won't be living in the city for a long period of time, and don't look forward to paying twice as much in rent than their long term renter neighbors. I understand that some people are very risk averse, but why should everyone be forced to buy so much insurance?

Landlords, on the other hand, are subject to more volatility (the risk of having a very long term renter) and so demand higher rents in exchange for bearing this risk. Landlord are effectively selling insurance in this system together with housing services. Some landlords may want to sell this insurance and others won't. This forcing of selling insurance is why landlords don't like rent control, because some landlords are also risk averse.

If tomorrow, rent control would be eliminated, then rents would fall quite a lot and many people would be evicted. A small group of long term tenants wouldn't be able to pay the new (lower) market prices, but a larger pool of newer tenants would see their rents fall as they would get an unbundling of the rental price from the insurance price.