Wage controls in the form of a series of minimum wage hikes just passed the California legislature.

Price controls in the form of rent caps have spread to suburbia.

Please consider Rent Control Spreads from Pricey San Francisco to Suburbs.

Last year, a raucous city council meeting over rent control in Alameda, population 75,000, resulted in two arrests. Farther north, city leaders of Sonoma County's Healdsburg, population 11,000, approved voluntary guidelines to keep rent increases to 10 percent or less.

Tenant activists in Alameda and Richmond — a waterfront industrial town of nearly 110,000 — are fighting to place rent control on municipal ballots this fall. So are residents of Burlingame, a pricey, leafy city of 30,000 on the San Francisco Peninsula.