The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco

In this paper, we exploit quasi-experimental variation in the assignment of rent control due to a 1994 ballot initiative to study the welfare impacts of rent control on its tenant bene ciaries as well as the impact on landlords' responses and the rental market as a whole. Leveraging new micro data which tracks an individual's migration over time, we nd that rent control increased the probability a renter stayed at their 1994 address by close to 20 percent. At the same time, using data on the history of individual parcels in San Francisco, we nd that treated landlords reduced their supply of available rental housing by 15%, by either converting to condos/TICs, selling to owner occupied, or redeveloping buildings. This led to a city-wide rent increase of 7% and caused $5 billion of welfare losses to all renters. We develop a dynamic, structural model of neighborhood choice to evaluate the welfare impacts of our reduced form e ects. We nd that rent control o ered large bene ts to impacted tenants during the 1995-2012 period, averaging between $3100 and $5900 per person each year, with aggregate bene ts totaling over $423 million annually. The substantial welfare losses due to decreased housing supply could be mitigated if insurance against large rent increases was provided as a form of government social insurance, instead of a regulated mandate on landlords. ∗Stanford University & NBER. Email: diamondr@stanford.edu. †Stanford University. Email: tmcquade@stanford.edu . ‡Stanford University. Email: zqian1@stanford.edu .