The new crop of freshmen and transfer students migrating to San Francisco with visions of red bridges and trollies in their heads are about to meet another bay city tradition with a little more sting: ridiculously high rents, courtesy of our misguided rent control law.

A quick catch-up for newbies: for almost 30 years, San Francisco landlords have been constrained from raising their tenants' rents any more than a small percentage. The idea is that in a town where landlords own a resource in rare supply and high demand, tenants need protection from unreasonable increases. So every year, the Rent Board determines an acceptable annual increase rate; right now, it's 1.7 percent. Two years ago, it was just 0.6 percent - if you were paying $1,000 a month, your landlord could only increase the rent by a measly six bucks that year.

For many residents, this seems to work out fine. Elderly or disabled renters on fixed incomes have set roots in apartments they've inhabited since the 1980's, hanging onto rents way below the city's average. But landlords can recognize that breed of tenant, and only one reaction makes business sense: stop investing in upkeep for those units. Why spend money on double-pane windows and repairing clothes washing machines when the unit has effectively been taken off the market and out of competition with comparable apartments?

Because here's the downside to the rent control plan: when a tenant vacates an apartment, the landlord is free to increase the rent to whatever they like. Which means that while the system debatably works our for long-term renters who pick a home and stay there, the impact this makes on landlords' income falls on the backs of frequent movers.

Students are a great example. Many of them come from out of town and aren't familiar with standard rents for the area; many need to move as semesters end and begin, as roommates leave town or budding relationships grow serious. As a group, students do a lot of moving.

That means they find themselves at the mercy of a rental market that is in turn at the mercy of our Rent Board. The bottom line is that rent control is meant to cost landlords money and save it for tenants. And wherever possible, smart landlords will return that cost right onto the backs of their most vulnerable tenants, a category in which nomadic students rank especially high.

San Francisco is a largely built-out city, and the result is admittedly a housing market over which landlords unencumbered by local laws would wield dangerous power. Smart laws, though, find ways to make beneficent or responsible behavior profitable for big business; rent control as it exists today is in direct combat with our landowners, and the collateral damage, as usual, hits the little guy.

So why aren’t we getting more help from Housing and Residential Services here at SF State? Incoming freshmen still pay over $1,000 a month to split cramped 12’ by 15’ rooms in Mary Park and Mary Ward halls, with no opt-out options to avoid paying for the meal plans many students don’t want. If SF State is to remain a truly diverse campus, we need to provide more affordable housing options for students without that kind of money.

Housing is a struggle for students in many cities. But San Francisco takes great pride in its progressiveness, and that pride is false if we can’t provide better options for our cash-crunched students