Rent control

For Fernando Nadal, the fight to bring rent control to Sacramento is personal. The retired nurse says he and his wife were evicted from their retirement community by a property manager who, among other things, claimed that a small gathering of acquaintances and journalists to discuss his son’s fatal drug overdose constituted having “a party” inside his rental unit. When Nadal received a 60-day eviction notice last year, he filed a complaint with the state Department of Fair Employment and Housing, which sided with the property manager.

The city of Half Moon Bay is in the early stages of considering some form of rent control that could ease a growing crisis felt by area residents who are forced to double up in homes or move out of the area just to make ends meet.

At the March 20 City Council meeting, Half Moon Bay resident Joaquin Jimenez spoke about the issue and how it has hit the Latino community on the Coastside particularly hard. Jimenez said he had collected 300 signatures from residents interested in seeing a rent control ordinance appear an upcoming ballot.

On March 20, voters in nine Chicago wards were faced with a simple question at the end of their ballot: “Should the state repeal the ban on rent control?”

Such a simple query belies the intense amount of organizing that has galvanized housing activists and changed the debate around Chicago’s housing problems. After more than a year of fighting to get the measure on the ballot, the outcome of the vote speaks to the frustration many people feel about rising housing costs in Chicago: 75 percent of voters supported the measure.

As tenant advocacy groups gather signatures to put rent-control reform on the November ballot, Santa Monica’s Rent Control Board is looking at the local possibilities if it succeeds. At their March meeting, the RCB expressed doubt it would be able to build consensus fast enough to draft a tandem measure to immediately expand its authority to either limit rents or expand rent control to more units if the Affordable Housing Act passes.

The city is suing a landlord who authorities say tried to bypass Oakland’s rent control ordinances and nearly triple his tenants’ rent by pretending to move into the duplex.

The city attorney’s office, alongside tenant rights legal firm Centro Legal de la Raza, filed a lawsuit March 20 against landlord Rong Fu Lee alleging that he claimed to be living in the downstairs unit of the duplex in 2016 and attempted to drastically increase the rent for Salvador Sotelo — who had lived at the West Oakland duplex with his family since 2003.

A typical two-bedroom apartment at market rates in Santa Monica required a yearly income of $111,000 last year, according to an annual update on the state of the City’s troubled rent control system.

It also shows dramatic rent differences in apartments that haven’t been vacated under the 1995 Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act and are still pegged to the 1979 caps on rent.

Mountain View's Rental Housing Committee could soon be headed back to the courtroom over a decision to exclude tenants at mobile home parks from the city's rent control protections.

Earlier this month, an attorney representing two mobile home residents at Santiago Villa issued a demand letter urging the committee to reverse its decision not to extend rent control to Mountain View's 1,100 mobile homes. If the committee refused, the residents would file a lawsuit to get the action rescinded, said attorney Armen Nercessian of the firm Fenwick & West.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Shanti Singh, shanti@tenantstogether.org

District Attorney Files Felony Charges for Election Fraud Against Signature Gatherers Paid by the California Apartment Association

After hearing from anxious landlords and tenants, Santa Monica’s Rent Control Board on Thursday asked staff to explore if -- and by how much -- both can share the rising costs of surcharges property owners now pass through to renters.

The board ordered more analysis on the possibility of instituting a cap on the total in surcharges the renters can absorb, based, for example, on total rent paid. These surcharges rise in buildings that are reassessed when they sell.