Hey, this all started with a question by someone asking if making your renters unable to afford their rent to fulfill a profit motive makes one an asshole. I said yes.
So what do we do to address the problem at hand? It sounds like you'd advocate for a repeal of rent control, because landlords should be able to extract all the profit they can from their properties? That's not going to fix the housing supply issue; all it's going to do is turn SF into a rich-people-only city where service workers need to live elsewhere and get bused in every day. That's not a place I want to live, and would be a direct result of "market forces" -- but not really, because government regulation nullifies market forces in many cases. Rent control is only one part of it... prop 13 and the city's byzantine planning process are others, and there are certainly more.
So, looking for suggestions? Here's what we do:
1. Gut the city's construction planning process. Make it more objective and based on zoning laws and building codes, as well as continuing to include provisions for low-income housing. Raise (and in some areas eliminate) building-height restrictions. Also, residents in the area no longer get a veto on new construction projects. As long as a building proposal follows the rules, it gets a rubber stamp. No discussion.
2. Repeal prop 13 for rental properties, and only allow it to apply to an owner's primary residence (obviously this is more difficult since prop 13 is state and not city law). This recognizes that owning a home gives you an illiquid asset, and fluctuations in property taxes (especially in an area like SF with strongly rising property values) can cause people to need to move. Homeownership should at least still offer that kind of security.
3. Repeal rent control city-wide and replace it with a gov't subsidy tied to renters' income. This subsidy can be funded with extra tax revenue from #2, and can likely be phased out over several years as rents stabilize and drop. I expect that rents will initially rise, but will start to lower again after a year or two under the new rules, and even more after a few more years as #1 reduces (and hopefully eliminates) the deficit in the housing supply. The (temporary) subsidy protects existing tenants until there's enough housing to support people of any economic status.
4. This is more subjective, but: make it more attractive for landlords to buy out their tenants (or just keep them) than to use shady practices like finding reclassification loopholes and bullying by doing the bare minimum required by law to maintain their properties. I'm not sure of the exact mechanisms to do this, but incentives should be aligned so that landlords want to keep good, steady, reliable tenants, even if new tenants might net them some extra cash. Basically we want to create an environment where landlords are mostly happy to keep their current tenants, but while tenants are also not afraid of the prospect of needing to move.
Is that helpful enough?