Research says: SF's expansion of rent control has made evictions way worse

Reason's Christian Britschgi analyzes a recent study out of Northwestern University, which found that the City's rent control laws have actually destabilized renters' situations. SF tenants are more frequently displaced by landlords now, as vacancy decontrol allows landlords to align new tenants' rents with market rates. Below, another case study where Woke housing policy fails to empower housing providers and renters alike.

A paper published last month by Northwestern University's Eilidh Geddes and Nicole Holz on SSRN, and summarized in a Cato Institute research brief published yesterday, found that the 1995 expansion of San Francisco's rent control law led to an increase in both evictions and complaints about wrongful evictions being filed with the city's rent board.

"We found that eviction notices filed with the rent board increased by 83 percent and that the number of wrongful eviction claims increased by 125 percent in zip codes with the average level of new exposure to rent control," write the researchers....

San Francisco's rent control ordinance allows landlords to reset rents to market rates for a new tenant, a policy known as vacancy decontrol. The Stanford study found that this gave landlords an incentive to get rid of rent-controlled tenants when rents started to rise quickly.

"Individuals in areas with quickly rising house prices and with few years at their 1994 address are less likely to remain at their current address, consistent with the idea that landlords try to remove tenants when the reward is high, through either eviction or negotiated payments," said Stanford researchers.

The Geddes and Holz study seems to confirm this result with its finding that evictions and complaints about wrongful evictions stayed relatively flat immediately after the expansion of rent control and then started to rise alongside rising market rents.

This article originally appeared in Reason. Read the whole thing here.

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