Rent control

A week after Santa Rosa Junior College students marched to Santa Rosa City Hall, council members voted in favor of a rent stabilization ordinance and a temporary moratorium halting substantial rent increases while city officials comb out the details of a long-term rent stabilization plan.

Santa Rosa residents and students marched from SRJC to downtown Santa Rosa’s council chamber May 3 to ask the city council to consider implementing a rent control and just-cause eviction ordinance in wake of the past year’s spike in rental costs.

For decades, the cost of renting a regulated apartment in New York has been partly determined not just by annual increases approved by a city board, but also by the far bigger raises allowed when an apartment becomes vacant.

Now, encouraged by their success in holding down the annual rent increases, advocates for tenants are renewing calls to end the vacancy increase, arguing that it is a significant and often overlooked factor in the cost of renting an apartment in the city.

For more than 25 years, Richard Johnson has called a one-bedroom apartment in Hayes Valley home — even as the neighborhood changed and rents increased, pushing out old friends. He never imagined he would be among them.

It's still the most affordable city for renters in Silicon Valley, but it will become less so this summer.

The city of East Palo Alto on Wednesday approved a 2.4 percent rent increase for residents in its 6-year-old rent control program.

The change goes into effect when the 2016-17 fiscal year begins July 1.

East Palo Alto has approved increases each of the past five years. The 2.4 percent jump is the highest yet.

After studying the idea for months, Santa Rosa appears poised to take its first definitive step toward imposing rent control, a controversial move supporters hope will protect residents from soaring rents but which landlords say will be “disastrous” unless overturned at the ballot box.

A sharply divided City Council on Tuesday will decide for the first time whether to tell staff to begin drafting a program that would set an annual cap on rent increases for apartments built before 1995, and if so, what that cap should be.

In a 4-3 vote, the Mountain View City Council gave the final nod to an ordinance creating a mandatory-mediation program for the city's rental housing despite many misgivings from its own supporters.

While critics blasted the new ordinance as ineffective, the approving majority stressed that it was more important to establish a program -- even an imperfect one -- so it could begin helping renters.

Although controversial renter protection measures overwhelmed the San Mateo City Council’s public consideration of recommendations made by its Housing Task Force earlier this month, the stakeholder group also released a report providing critical insight into the area’s red-hot housing market.

Key facts include that nearly half of the city’s housing stock is comprised of rentals, the vast majority of those currently residing in San Mateo cannot afford to buy a home today and prices have drastically increased as the city absorbs an influx of new jobs.

The San Mateo City Council were again unable to achieve consensus and did not adopt tenant protection measures for residents struggling to stay in their homes after dozens of property owners spoke in opposition of a relocation assistance program they compared to rent control.

A tenants’ group opted not to come to Monday night’s meeting having vowed to place rent control in the city on the November ballot and the City Council seemed willing to let it go to the voters after failing for the second week to reach a consensus on how to address the impacts on renters.

As Silicon Valley's housing market heats up and tighter rent regulations from City Hall loom, landlords are trading rent-controlled units for market-rate housing faster than ever. Now one councilman wants them to pay to move displaced tenants.

The program, the first of its kind in San Jose, would require landlords to refund tenants' security deposits and pay relocation benefits to low- and very low-income households. The payout would be equal to three months of market-rate rent, said Councilman Chappie Jones, who released the plan Friday.