Under the city's rent control rules, a tenant can claim multiple rental units in the same building as their "principal place of residence." That's right — in a city where thousands of people can't find a single affordable apartment, the law explicitly allows rent-controlled tenants to lock up two or more units for personal use, all while enjoying below-market rates.

Meanwhile, property owners? They can only claim a single primary residence. Because of course.

Let's sit with that asymmetry for a second. We are constantly told that the housing shortage is an existential crisis. The Board of Supervisors has spent years vilifying property owners for not doing enough to house people. We tax vacant units. We restrict short-term rentals. We impose Byzantine permitting requirements on anyone who wants to add a unit to their building. And yet — baked right into the rent control ordinance — is a provision that lets one person monopolize multiple rent-controlled apartments.

What's the public policy rationale here? If the goal is to maximize housing availability, this makes zero sense. If a tenant needs extra space, there's a market solution for that: rent a bigger apartment. Allowing someone to sit on two or three below-market units while the city's vacancy rate hovers near historic lows isn't progressive housing policy. It's a subsidy for the well-connected few at the expense of everyone searching for a place to live.

As one local resident put it bluntly: "They punish home and building owners too." That about sums it up. The rules tighten the screws on property owners at every turn while carving out generous exceptions for a protected class of long-term tenants.

None of this is to say rent control doesn't serve a purpose. Stability matters. But policy coherence also matters. You can't declare a housing emergency with one hand and enable unit hoarding with the other. If we're serious about making San Francisco livable for people who don't already have a sweetheart lease from 2004, this loophole should be on the chopping block yesterday.

Fix the double standard. One person, one principal residence. It's not radical — it's common sense.