The Glendale City Council will try to tackle the issue of fast-rising rents by securing tenants longer leases to avoid having to suddenly move because of a rent spike and possibly requiring landlords to pay for moving expenses.
The direction to city staff came Tuesday night during the latest discussion on the topic of rent affordability.
City staffers laid out an eight-point plan on how to create and incentivize more affordable housing, but Councilman Vartan Gharpetian said those would take a long time to implement. He said he wanted something more immediate for the month-to-month tenants who are presently facing surging leases.
The city's just-cause eviction ordinance states that landlords have to give no more than 60 days notice to a tenant in order to vacate a unit.
"We need to come up with a solution to take the load off the people who cannot adjust their lives within 60 days to pay $500, $600, $1,000 more in rent," Gharpetian said.
"If the interest rates go up 2%, half of the people who own homes can't pay their mortgage," he added.
State law, however, preempts the city from extending the 60-day notice period.
However, one change city officials will look into is requiring landlords throughout the city to sign yearly leases instead of month-to-month arrangements so tenants will have an idea of how much their rents will increase down the road, said City Atty. Mike Garcia.
"It's not rent control, but at least it provides a certainty in a rent schedule for a year," said Mayor Paula Devine.
Rent control was discussed in recent months by council members, but they have said it's likely not the best solution for Glendale because it could potentially punish landlords who have worked hard to maintain long-term tenants.
More than 60% of Glendale residents are renters and 57% them are cost-burdened, meaning they spend at least a third of their monthly incomes on rent, according to a city staff report.
Gharpetian said he is often contacted by renters struggling to deal with sudden lease spikes and gave a few examples. One tenant reported having their monthly rent jump from $975 to $1,495 and another resident's jumped from $1,495 to $1,995, he said.
Another change the city will examine is requiring landlords to cough up some of the moving expenses for those tenants who cannot afford increased rents and have to move elsewhere, Garcia said.
The proposed modifications to the city's just-cause eviction ordinance will likely be the first action to address affordability to go before the council for a vote, the city attorney added.
Key elements of the eight-point plan that will return in the future include implementing a separate fee developers would pay to build more affordable housing units. There's also the potential implementation of a citywide zoning-inclusion ordinance, which would mandate affordable-housing units in future construction projects.
But those measures will likely take much longer to develop and implement and could take at least a year or so, said City Manager Scott Ochoa.
Another element would be to promote greater density in many parts of the city by increasing the number of units while decreasing their minimum sizes.
Devine, however, said that may not be the best approach in existing high-density parts of the city that are already made up of renters. Issues such as traffic could be negatively impacted, she said.
"That would just create an adverse impact in the neighborhood which could least afford more density," Devine said.