Housing affordability and domestic violence: The case of San Francisco’s rent control policies

Over a third of women in the United States experience intimate partner violence (IPV); existing research demonstrates that household finances are one important driver of such violence. We study the effects of rent control on IPV to develop understanding of the financial causes of IPV. Rent control may lessen financial stressors within a relationship and decrease strain that leads to violence. Conversely, it may make leaving the relationship more costly, shifting the bargaining power in the relationship and leading to more violence. We leverage the 1994 expansion of rent control in San Francisco as a natural experiment to study this question. This expansion created variation across ZIP codes in the number of rental units that were newly rent controlled. We exploit this variation in a continuous difference-in-difference design. We estimate an elasticity of -0.08 between the number of newly rent controlled units and assaults on women resulting in hospitalization. This effect translates to a nearly 10% decrease in assaults on women for the average ZIP code. This relationship is not explained by changes in neighborhood composition or overall crime, consistent with the effects being driven by individual level changes in IPV.