Low-rent idea

It could be, as a housing rights advocate in San Francisco lamented, that the troubles of renters have been left out of the national discussion on bailouts. And if the Bay Area city is floating in enough cash to do something about that, it should by all means feel free to subsidize tenants who cannot afford their rent. Landlords, though, are not San Francisco’s bailout resource.

Yet that’s how they would be treated under legislation that goes before the Board of Supervisors this week for its second reading. The new rules would forbid the landlords of rent-controlled buildings from raising the rent if doing so would bring the price to more than one-third of the tenant’s income.

Close to 90% of the city’s units already are rent-controlled, with annual increases set by a board and averaging about 2%. Now, though, the amount a landlord could charge would be tied not only to the consumer price index but to the tenant’s personal financial situation.

“The law is really innovative and hopefully precedent-setting,” Sara Shortt, executive director of the House Rights Committee of San Francisco, told The Times. It’s definitely the former, but we hope it never becomes the latter. In fact, if sanity and fairness prevail, it won’t happen at all; Mayor Gavin Newsom has indicated that he is likely to veto the legislation.

The wretched economy has made the prospect of homelessness, or at least of a life-disrupting move, frighteningly close for too many people, both renters and homeowners. It is appropriate, indeed humane, for the city to work toward providing a stable housing environment, which it could do through emergency subsidies or by offering incentives such as bigger rent increases down the line to landlords who cut their tenants a break now. It also can restrict rent increases citywide through its long-standing rent-control ordinance.

To make the rent restriction more palatable to a potentially reluctant board, Supervisor Chris Daly watered it down to cover solely tenants who have lost their jobs or suffered other reductions in income. But that doesn’t address the inherent defect in his proposal -- that it seeks to turn private landlords into an unwilling agency of social welfare, their incomes tied not to market forces or fair-pricing considerations but to their individual tenants’ purse strings.

The Board of Supervisors, which passed the proposal on its first reading last week, should reconsider this fundamental change to the landlord-tenant relationship. We all like the idea of businesspeople doing the benevolent thing when their customers are hurting, but it is not fair for a public entity to force such behavior on a private one.