Creative Commons/Sam Soneja

Pacific and Presidio Heights in San Francisco

Well, my latest column has certainly started that discussion — and then some.

I wrote about a growing quandary: as more and more wealthy people live in San Francisco, should they be eligible for rent control? After all, rent control was meant to help the poor and working class. Now landlords of relatively modest means say the have ended up subsidizing the housing of the rich. Talk about unintended consequences.

The column received a huge response: an online debate of about 200 comments so far. It’s one of the largest reactions to date on The Bay Citizen, which requires registration to comment publicly. Partly because of that restriction, the website typically doesn’t get the large volume of anonymous snarky one-liners that most news sites receive.

What’s striking about the comments is that many are quite substantive (some are as long as my column) and thoughtful.

And rather than being limited to the narrow issue that I raised, the conversation has evolved into a much larger debate over the very existence of rent control.

The first comment, by a reader identified as LawSci, went right to this broader controversy:

“Class warfare all the time by the media knows no bounds. How is it somehow unfair to have people of relatively modest means subsidize more wealthy, and somehow fair to have them subsidize less wealthy? … Rent control is the government forcing home owners to subsidize rent at below market rates. Actually this is a ‘government taking without just compensation’ forbidden by the Constitution.”

Many jumped in to defend rent control and vilify “greedy” landlords.

Eric Brooks challenged just about every comment that was sympathetic to landlords. He took issue with the idea that rent control is a form of subsidized housing.

“My landlord (like most landlords) doesn't subsidize shit. They buy as much property as they can, pay others a pittance to maintain it, and charge myself and my fellow tenants vastly exorbitant rents so that they can sit on their asses, go on continuous vacations, play golf, and most importantly flip both their real estate and financial investments for even higher profits, so that they can become even wealthier and buy more property with which to rob the rest of blind through rent and speculation.”

People also chimed in with their own personal experiences as a way to shed light on the issue. John Smith wrote:

“Speaking for myself I am in a rent controlled 1 bedroom apartment in an old Victorian and it costs $1600 a month which is huge portion of my income. In my neighborhood the current Craigslist price of a 1 bedroom is at least $300 more than that. If I didn't have rent control I would have had to move out of San Francisco long ago.”

MC Under, a landlord, shared in great detail the finances and saga of a family-owned rental property. “We're losing about $20,000 per year.”

There was plenty of vitriol aimed at me personally for writing about this subject at all, prompting longtime local political consultant Jim Ross to post on Twitter: “@scottjames You are a brave man or a glutton for punishment.”

You see, in San Francisco, rent control is the considered the third rail — no one is supposed to go near the subject, or else they risk harm.

But if the comments are any indication, many people are itching to talk about this. And if my column has provided all sides a platform to do begin doing that, then it has done its job.