Rent control measures hit Bay Area ballots
Proposals would cover at least 100,000 people in 52,000 apartments
A tenant movement has been gathering steam in the Bay Area, turning rent control into a hot-button political issue for the first time in decades.
On Nov. 8, voters in Alameda, Richmond, Mountain View, Burlingame and San Mateo will decide whether to enact new rent control proposals. In Oakland, where there is already a law, Measure JJ would impose new regulations limiting landlords’ ability to increase rents and expand just-cause eviction protections.
The outcome of this flurry of measures could significantly affect future rental policy. There are two questions at stake. One, is rent control an effective tool for addressing the state’s housing crisis? And second, is it fair
for city officials to make a certain category of property owners shoulder the financial cost? By state law, cities can limit annual rent increases only on apartments built before Feb. 1, 1995. The Costa-Hawkins Rental Act also exempts all condos and single-family homes from rent control.
“It’s really historic,” said Leah Simon-Weisberg, legal director for Tenants Together, a statewide tenants-advocacy group that has been mobilizing support for the measures. According to the group, the new laws, if passed, would cover more than 100,000 people living in 52,000 apartments.
The measures sponsored by tenant advocates would limit annual rent increases based on the Consumer Price Index. In Alameda and Mountain View, city officials have put forward dueling rent-stabilization measures that do not set caps but instead require landlords to go through a new bureaucratic process if they want to raise rents higher than 5 percent.
Rent control supporters say it’s vital that the measures pass to protect lowand middle-income tenants from steep increases that are driving out longtime residents. They say rent control is something cities can do now to stanch the bleeding and give residents relief from the stress of being in constant fear of losing their homes.
“The working class and huge populations of color would be driven out of the Bay Area very quickly without rent control,” said Daniel DeBolt, a volunteer with Yes on Measure V in Mountain View. “It’s the one thing that stands between the displacement epidemic getting much much worse.”
Yet the California Apartment Association, which has spent more than half a million dollars to defeat the proposals, argues that expanding rent control only makes things worse.
“People will move into a rent control apartment and stay there for many years, and stay there for far longer than they need to as their family and income grow,” said Joshua Howard, CAA’s senior vice president of local public affairs. “That takes that unit off the market and constricts the supply of available housing as you’ve seen in Oakland, Berkeley and Santa Monica.”
The CAA cites the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office to back its claims. The February 2016 LAO report “Perspectives on helping low-income Californians afford housing” stated in part that propos- als to expand rent control would probably discourage new housing construction and could lead to property owners cutting back on making repairs.
Tenant activists accused the CAA of putting out what they described as a deceptive mailer with the legislative analyst’s logo on it to mislead voters into thinking the agency had taken a position on the specific ballot measures — which it has not. Tenant groups picketed outside the CAA offices in Hayward, but the landlord group says it stands by the mailer.
Catherine Pauling, a spokeswoman for the Alameda Renters Coalition, said renters’ groups are being vastly outspent by deeppocketed landlord groups.
“Talk about David and Goliath. They’ve got all these TV spots running and robo calls,” Pauling said. “We’re really focusing on phone banking and going door to door.”
Melvin Willis, a community organizer with Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, helped collect signatures for Measure L in Richmond, where he says tenants desperately need protection from unjust evictions.
“We’ve worked with tenants who’ve gotten $300 rent increases in rat trap buildings,” said Willis, a City Council candidate, “but they’re afraid to ask for repairs because they don’t want to get evicted.”
But does rent control work?
Christopher Palmer, an assistant professor who studies real estate at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, says it’s a “patch” solution that doesn’t solve the root problem: The region just hasn’t built enough housing to accommodate the influx of new people.
“It just keeps it from getting worse for those who are lucky enough to get into a rent-controlled unit and helps them stay there,” Palmer said. “The way I see it, we’ve had this affordability crisis, 30 to 40 years in the making, and the solution of rent control is to have landlords pay for getting us out of that mess.”
The East Bay Rental Housing Association, a group of landlords and property managers fighting Oakland’s JJ, said it places undue hardship on smaller landlords whose expenses are outpacing the amount they can collect under rent control.
“They’re just piling more and more on the property owners, and this is the frustration,” said Wayne Rowland, EBRHA’s president.
The outcome in each city will depend upon how many renters turn out to the polls. Homeowners usually vote in greater numbers.
“I realize it’s not a perfect solution,” said San Ma- teo Vice Mayor David Lim. “There are plenty of good, decent landlords who want to do the right thing, but when you’re facing families being displaced, kids being moved out of schools, people not being able to live in their community, it’s an easy choice for me.”