San Francisco Housing Policy is Stuck in 1979, and That’s How Your Landlord Wants It
If you think San Francisco housing policy is working, or that Costa Hawkins is about affordability, some landlords got a 1980s “new construction” apartment with a $3,368 rent sticker to sell you.
Let’s rewind to 1979. The year The Dukes of Hazzard premiered, the Walkman hit store shelves, and the GOAT Mohammad Ali (kind of) retired.
Also in 1979, San Francisco passed rent control. But not for all renters, just people lucky enough to live in buildings constructed before June of that year. Everything built after that is free from local rent control protections.That’s right: not one unit built after 1979 has San Francisco rent control.
And if that sounds like a bad policy that should be fixed, the real estate industry already made sure you can’t. In 1995, the state legislature passed the Costa Hawkins Rental Housing Act, a law written by the California Association of Realtors to lock in that 1979 cutoff forever, blocking cities from expanding rent control.
A Law Designed to Fail Renters
Costa Hawkins doesn’t just block rent control on anything built after 1979, it also bans vacancy control. That’s the ability for cities to limit how much rent can go up between tenants. So every time a tenant gets priced out, evicted, or pushed out through landlord harassment or letting a building fall into disrepair, the landlord can push their reset button and jack up the rent to whatever they want.
In San Francisco alone, over 86,000 units are categorically exempt from rent control because of this law, and mega-landlords know exactly how to exploit that.
This is a city where the cost of living is so high that if you lose your rent-controlled apartment, you don’t just move to a neighborhood, you get pushed out of the city entirely. And the new apartments being built? They’re not built for you. They’re built for wealth extraction.
Deregulation Doesn’t Build Homes, It Builds Profits
Costa Hawkins is defended by the same folks who brought you “let the market decide.” These are the same people who’ll tell you that rent control is the problem, that inclusionary zoning is the enemy, and that all we need to fix the crisis is more “supply” of market rate housing. And yet, every year, rents get higher and higher. Every year, more “market rate” apartments get built and still sit empty.
Because these apartments are not meant to house people. They’re just investments for the wealthy. This is what happens when you let corporate landlords, lobbyists, and billionaires decide housing policy. Costa Hawkins isn’t some neutral or outdated policy. It’s a deliberate, ongoing barrier to affordability.
Rent Control Works
You won’t hear this from the real estate-backed “YIMBY” groups or tech billionaires, but rent control is extremely effective for stabilizing communities and stopping displacement. The reason they keep calling it a “failure” is because it works for renters.
Rent control, public housing, community land trusts, co-ops, and strong tenant protections don’t produce record profits for REITs or hedge funds. What they do is keep working people in their homes, prevent evictions, and redistribute power and wealth. And that’s exactly why the real estate industry keeps spending obscene amounts of money to crush any efforts by tenants rights groups to expand rent control.
We need to expand rent control. Otherwise, we will continue to have a city where you need to make 3.4x the minimum wage to afford the average apartment.