Rent control stifles new construction, and allows you to live in relative luxury at the expense of others.
Let me ask you, if rent control is the solution to high rent, why not introduce legislation to cut all current rent rates in half?
Rent control in San Francisco only applies to buildings built before June 1979. Landlords of buildings built after that are free to increase rent as they wish. If anything, it should promote more construction.
If so, is it a larger factor than the insane city-wide height restrictions and strong anti-development lobby?
(If you'd like to point a finger at the folks who obstruct demolition of rent-controlled units to construct new units, I point you to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9210429 ) :)
Height restrictions are another factor, as is the requirements around affordable housing.
San Francisco's Sangiacomo ("AKA 'The Father of Rent Control'") and his tenants came up with a really great solution for this:
1) Buy a rent-controlled building.
1a) If there's no room for the first phase of your building plan, destroy some of it it and displace the affected tenants.
2) Build the first phase of construction as quickly as humanly possible.
3) Move the displaced tenants back in at the rate that they were paying when they were displaced. These tenants also retain their rent control privileges for as long as they stay in that unit.
4) Build the remainder of the building and rent it out at "market rate".
This works, and works well, as Trinity Place (1190 Mission) has shown us.