Letter to the Editor, San Francisco Business Times, June 5, 2009

I agree wholeheartedly with Kenneth Sproul’s Guest Opinion (“Tap the great untaxed wealth transfer,” May 29-June 4 issue).

I have been a mortgage broker in San Francisco for many years, and remember asking then-Supervisor Carol Ruth Silver about means testing tenants before granting them rent control status. She seemed to think that was an invasion of privacy. I pointed out the Mortgage Credit Certificate program, as well as the Redevelopment Agency’s BMR (Below Market Rent) program, required applicants to submit tax returns.

San Francisco’s rent control constitutes a government taking, plain and simple. Subsidizing housing costs on the backs of housing providers is despicable. As the current Board of Supervisors continues to criminalize the act of providing housing, private citizens and companies will refuse to provide this much-sought-after commodity. Shall we pay our Housing Director $188,000 a year, only to find the FBI closing their offices to search for Section 8 fraud?

Section 8 recipients have to document their low-income status, and I am proud to have my tax dollars allocated to those who need government assistance. Not so with rent control, San Francisco-style. This city grants life estates to some lucky tenants, regardless of their income. It’s an arbitrary giveaway, lacking even a means test, and fails to help the less fortunate.

San Francisco needs to quit ignoring economic reality to kowtow to the self-perpetuating, tax-dollar-financed tenant activists, and cease extorting these subsidies from private citizens.

I believe passionately that this pig headed pounding on property rights undermines a compassionate agenda, where the truly needy are cast aside for the exigencies of the moment.



Catherine G. Tripp, San Francisco