Tom Minear: San Francisco’s housing crisis is a rent cap red light for the Greens

Greens MP Max Chandler-Mather wants Australia to copy San Francisco’s rent cap. Tom Minear visited, and couldn’t imagine a less appealing example. Find out why.

For someone who’s been in parliament barely a year – and who didn’t even own a suit before he was elected – Max Chandler-Mather already looks a lot like a politician.

By spearheading the Greens campaign for rent caps with populist zeal, the Queensland MP has become the de facto opposition spokesman on housing, Australia’s most pressing problem. How many other rookie crossbenchers earn the wrath of the PM?

Chandler-Mather might take this as a compliment, and for a while I would have meant it as such. Capping rents is one of those ideas that seems innately obvious, not only to the third of the population who are renting but to those who spent years saving to escape their landlords. With rents skyrocketing, Chandler-Mather is on a winner.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese gives Max Chandler-Mather a serve in parliament. Picture: Martin Ollman (NCA NewsWire)

But I had assumed the foundation of his (admittedly misdirected) campaign – to block federal money for social housing unless state premiers regulate rent increases – was purely political, to embarrass Labor and enhance the Greens’ cost-of-living credentials.

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As it turns out, Chandler-Mather is convinced a rent cap is actually the right policy. And his evidence, which he tweeted in June, includes San Francisco. After visiting recently, I’m not sure there is a less appealing example for Australia to follow.

In San Francisco a rent stabilisation board determines how much landlords are able to increase the rent. This year the limit is 3.6%. Rent caps are used around the world and are desperately needed in Oz. Check out all their decisions here:https://t.co/Je1NsWFPA2

— Max Chandler-Mather (@MChandlerMather) June 27, 2023

San Francisco is the epicentre of California’s homelessness crisis which, as a landmark study concluded, is the result of housing costs becoming impossible to bear for the lowest-income residents. Thousands are sleeping rough, in campervans lining suburban streets and in slum-like encampments downtown.

The Tenderloin district has been rendered a no-go zone by drugs and crime. And yet, even there, the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $US475 a week – that’s $A744. Just to the north in the nicer Nob Hill, you’ll pay $US680 ($A1065).

San Francisco’s streets are lined by campervans housing the city’s homeless residents. Picture: Paul Kuroda

That’s the result of 44 years of rent control. When the city’s issues were pointed out to Chandler-Mather, he maintained rent caps “bring down rents” and claimed attacking the policy required “an enormous amount of intellectual dishonesty”.

To be fair, he was right to suggest chronic underinvestment in housing was the city’s central problem, and that excluding properties built after 1979 from rent control didn’t help.

But the scheme reduced rental stock, decreased affordability and increased inequality. It helped the city’s old residents and hurt new ones.

Perhaps the truth is that Chandler-Mather knows this and simply doesn’t care. Voters will thank him today, and to hell with tomorrow. That would really make him a politician.