A sign of rent control fights to come?
Renter Holly Morris, with her dog Mr. Wilson, is facing a 40 percent rent increase after the building was removed from rent control. The owners say the increases are allowing them to make needed investments.
for their apartments after a rent-controlled tenant moves out.
If Proposition 10 passes, those restrictions would disappear. Cities and counties could dramatically expand efforts to cap rent hikes at a time when millions of California families face high rent burdens and the state grapples with a housing shortage stretching back a generation.
The limited version of rent control that Mountain View voters backed in 2016 is allowed under state law. Both tenants and landlords point to what’s happened as a harbinger of what could be in California’s future.
Tenants reference the thousands of families that have had their rents stabilized while landlords point to owners of older apartment complexes who have sold to developers who in turn force tenants out, tear down the buildings and build new condominiums.
Margaret Abe-koga, a Mountain View city councilwoman who opposes rent control, said the community is divided.
“It’s almost like you can’t talk about it anymore,” Abe-koga said. “The anger about this issue – we can’t seem to have a productive conversation.”
With its array of lowrise
office parks, Mountain View is hard to distinguish from other communities in Silicon Valley, except that it’s home to Google’s headquarters.
On a recent weekday afternoon, the tech giant’s self-driving cars whirred around downtown Mountain View. Outside an empty storefront on Castro Street, the city’s main drag, startup entrepreneurs were advertising a new app that takes a picture of your feet and sends the photo to online shoe stores so you’ll get the right size.
Silicon Valley has seen a tech-driven surge in new jobs since the end of the recession, and new homebuilding hasn’t kept pace. Costs have ballooned from a median $2,214 a month for a two-bedroom rental in Mountain View at the end of 2010, to $3,408 in 2018, according to real estate website Zillow.
Even with the rising prices, Mountain View might not seem like a city that would push for rent control. Residents are relatively well off, with a median household income of nearly $110,000, according to census figures. But nearly 6 in 10 Mountain View households – the city has a population of about 79,000 – are renters, providing a
strong base of support for a campaign.
In 2015, tenant activists began agitating for rent restrictions, leading to a sixhour October City Council hearing on the issue that stretched past midnight. But the council didn’t support limiting rent hikes, leaving tenant groups fuming.
“We were angry and it was the right kind of anger,” said Steve Chandler, 68, one of the city’s leading tenant activists. “This was a, ‘Mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore.’”
Tenant organizations began collecting signatures to put new rent restrictions before voters. Council members subsequently drafted a measure that would have made large rent hikes subject to arbitration instead of simply limiting them and put it on the same ballot. But despite a $330,000 opposition campaign funded by landlords, voters passed the tenant-driven rent control initiative and turned down the council-sponsored one. Mountain View and the Bay Area city of Richmond became the first local governments in California to fully implement new rent control rules in more than three decades.