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How about instead of forcing developers to build "affordable" or "low-income" housing, which they do not want to do because they lose money building such housing, we instead incentivize them to build a LOT more market rate housing? This is a simple problem of supply and demand. Increase supply to meet the demand, and prices will normalize. Artificially build non-market rate housing and you create the same sort of perverse incentives and market distortions that we already see with rent control and Prop 13.

So what? Just say F it and make a change as drastic and damaging in the long-term as Prop 13? Something that will be impossible to repeal in the future, yet another "third rail" of politics that everybody agrees is horrible but nobody has the political will to fix?

No, how about we start with GOOD ideas that will make positive changes in the right direction, like the ill-fated SB 827, instead of BAD ideas that promise quick fixes to hard problems?

the problem is supply is limited, you can only fit so many buildings into an area.

Have you ever been to Tokyo? Seoul? New York City? They've figured out this ingenious way to build a lot of housing in a small footprint of land. It's pretty obscure though, so maybe you haven't heard of it.

And you need a number of affordable units to sustain the economy there, coffee shops, retail, restaurants need employees that aren't making 300k+/year, and people working there can't afford market rate.

The problem with this thinking is that you are so accustomed to the current state of things you are unable to imagine a way in which "market rate" is affordable to the average worker. That says a lot about our perceptions of housing in California.

What is the argument for non-means tested rent control? It's completely nonsensical to me that wealthy people can benefit substantially from rent control, at the expense of the landlord and the state/federal government.

It's principally a problem with direct democracy, which is what the insanity of California's proposition system is.