Just as California voters might overturn the state’s heavy-handed restrictions on new rent-control units, Stanford economists Rebecca Diamond and Tim McQuade presented a paper in October making the provocative argument that San Francisco rent control ultimately drove rents up citywide since 1995.

But the conclusion from their findings is not necessarily that rent control is bad. Instead, the findings are a bit more complex.

In the paper, snappily titled “The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco,” Diamond and McQuade used public and private data to look at how often people moved out of rent-control units, how often landlords converted those units to new types of housing not covered under rent control, and how median rents changed since the 1990s.

Read More:   https://sf.curbed.com/2017/11/3/16603900/rent-control-san-francisco-stanford-study-gentrification