SF rent-controlled apartments have no public registry — you cannot verify if your unit is rent-controlled before signing

You find a 1BR for $2,400 in a Victorian on Divisadero. Great price. You ask the landlord if it is rent-controlled. They say 'I'm not sure' or 'no.' You sign a 1-year lease. After move-in, you discover the building was built in 1923 — it IS rent-controlled under SF Rent Ordinance (buildings before 1979). Your landlord has been raising rent 8% annually on previous tenants who did not know their rights. So what? Rent control is the single most valuable renter protection in SF — it caps annual increases at 60% of CPI (roughly 2-4%/year). But there is no easily searchable public database where you can type in an address and see: is this unit rent-controlled? what is the legal maximum rent? what was the last tenant paying? The SF Rent Board has records but they are not digitized or searchable by address. You must physically visit or call the Rent Board to verify. Landlords exploit this information asymmetry to charge new tenants above the legal rent or to claim units are not rent-controlled when they are. Why does this persist in the first place? The SF Rent Board operates on a $7M annual budget with outdated systems. Their database is partially digitized but not publicly searchable. Landlords are required to register rent-controlled units but there is no penalty for non-registration and no cross-referencing with building permit data. The city has the data (building age from assessor records + Rent Board registrations) but has never built the public lookup tool.