Well, first the speculators come and buy up as much property as there is, this drives rents up to the point that the people who need to rent, can't afford to, thus driving out the Lower/middle class who serve them, if they even live there, Welcome to gentrification! Greed is the problem and it's pandemic. In this case causing artificially high property values. And now the gov't knee jerks by doing this. California is a mess!

I often wondered what happened to all those leftover Marxists in the USA who all went silent after the butchery of Tienanmen Square and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now I see what happened - they all moved to California. No wonder that state is going belly up and bleeding taxpayers. At the rate they're going soon there will only be public employees and illegal aliens left.

This simply amounts to indirect confiscation of the landlords' property by the municipality. Maybe if the powers that be in SanFran would instead concentrate on creating a favorable climate for business and prosperity, instead of forcing everyone who has anything to give it to those who have less, the renters could actually get good jobs and pay market-based rents. So this will further encourage the mass exodus of the prosperous from California - a big reason why the People's Republic has seen "unexpected revenue shortfalls". Meanwhile Texas, which has no income tax as no socialist/fascist lunacy, created more new jobs in the last quarter than the other 49 states combined, and is enjoying a period of relative prosperity in a time of economic depression. But the income-redistribution crowd running Kaliforn-ee-ya is expecting mommy Nancy and daddy Barack to come running to their rescue with an open (US taxpayers') wallet, rather than face the all-too-predictable results of their anti-capitalist policy choices. If that comes to pass, contact your Governor and demand that your state stop sending tax revenues to Washington immediately!

What ever happened to section 8 housing? Now we also have section 42, and 48 government housing, similiar to section 8 housing, and age 62 and over housing.

Government housing was suppose to be the "rent cap" for afordable housing in neighborhoods.

I would rather see some REAL LAWS changed or applied to the current rental problems in this country. Laws that would easily block and prosacute landlords that engage in:

Retailory evictions
Black Listing
Posting Slandereous, Libelous and defaming lies about tenants on the internet/web.
Collecting for "credit checks" that never happen but the potential tenant paid for it.

maybe "general public" needs to just do the right thing and turn his house over to these poor down-trodden homeless people instead of insisting that everyone else who owns property do it, but not him. My brother the proud liberal feels the same way about tax rates...increase everyone elses taxes who make some undefined higher income because after all they can afford it and how can they possibly really need all that money.

Dear General Public,

Those people who live in cardboard boxes are totally incapable of maintaining a house anywhere. Some are mentally challenged, some are severe alchoholics and some just plain like living that way. You could give them a house of their own, but it would soon be a wreck. And I certainly would not want to live next to one. You can be as Christian as you want, but reality is what it is.

My friends father died and left him a rent control appartment building, his propery taxes went up, Insurance went up, Maintance went up, Fuel cost went up but could not raise any rent, so he gave the building to NYC and wished them luck, have at it boys, and walked away. We are talking rents as low as $200.00 a month, were that same apartment would rent for $1500.00 a month

We need to kick California and New York out of the United States of America and let them form their own communist country independant of ours.

How ironic that the People's Republic of China is more capitalistic than California.