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building permits that have been associated with that property since 1980. These data come <br />from the San Francisco Planning Office. This allows us to track large investments into <br />renovations and changes in building use type over time based on the quantity and type of <br />permit issued to each building over time. <br />The parcel number also allows us to link to the parcel history file from the Assessor's <br />office. This allows us to observe changes in the parcel structure over time. In particular, this <br />allows us to determine whether parcels were split off over time, a common occurrence when a <br />multi -family apartment building (one parcel) splits into separate parcels for each apartment <br />during a condo conversion. <br />Historical data on annual San Francisco wide market rents are from a dataset pro- <br />duced by Eric Fisher, who collected historical apartment advertisements dating back to the <br />1950s. See https://experimental-geography.blogspot.ca/2016/05/employment-construction- <br />and-cost-of-san.html for further details on the construction. Figure 1 shows the time series <br />of SF rental rates generated by this data. We use an imputation procedure to construct <br />annual rents at the zipcode level. Specifically, using census data we construct a relationship <br />between zipcode house price deviations from the SF mean and zipcode rent deviations from <br />the SF mean. We then use this relationship to construct zipcode level rent measures in the <br />years we don't have census data.7 <br />Summary statistics are provided in Table 1 and Table 2. <br />4 Reduced Form Effects <br />Studying the effects of rent control is challenged by the usual endogeneity issues. The tenants <br />who choose to live in rent -controlled housing, for example, are likely a selected sample. To <br />overcome these issues, we exploit the particular institutional history of the expansion of rent <br />control in San Francisco. Specifically, we exploit the successful 1994 ballot initiative which <br />Census data reports rents paid by tenants, not asking rents. We therefore use a level adjustment to <br />ensure that the average imputed market SF rent is equal to that reported by Eric Fisher. See the appendix <br />for the exact details of the imputation procedure. <br />10 <br />