Affordable Rent is Possible!
- The San Diego Renters Union is demanding the City of San Diego implement a rent stabilization program to cover all residential units which are rented or leased.
In 2003, I sat in the San Diego City Council Chambers, watching Councilman George Stevens put on a political charade, as he dramatically introduced a proposal for the Land Use and Housing Committee to study a possible rent stabilization program for San Diego.
The proposal was quickly voted down by the full Council a few weeks later, after the San Diego Apartment Owners Association raised hundreds of thousands of dollars by asking each member to donate $5 for each unit they owned or managed to an emergency campaign fund to defeat this whisper of rent fairness. Through their lobbyists at City Hall, trolling the hallways, they used a carrot and stick approach to defeat the proposal. Dollars now for those who voted against the plan, dollars for opponents in future elections if they didn’t; the message was clear.
I asked Councilman Stevens immediately after the vote whether he would pursue rent stabilization through other means, like a city referendum or organizing tenants. He stumbled around the Council seats, with a low wailing, throwing his arms in the air, like a preacher who had just lost a convert, saying “its over, its over” several times. I was going to ask him another question, when he turned toward where the apartment owner’s association executives were sitting and smiled.
His nod, or was it a wink, capped the day’s travesty. He was going to run for the state legislature and wanted to tell voters he had “fought” for his district’s tenants. Meanwhile San Diego landlords, mostly distant corporations, and their hired property managers, sighed, marveled at how well the system worked – the best which money can buy – and went back to gouging hard-working San Diegans for even more of their take home pay.
Forty-eight percent of all who live in San Diego pay rent or lease. Eighty percent of all single income renters in San Diego pay more than 30 percent of their income for rent. Thirty percent of income is what the United States Department of Housing and Urban Affairs (HUD) considers affordable, thus fair. Now, granted, some folks want to pay more for amenities and ambiance, and that is their right. However, there are literally tens of thousands of our residents who are going without meals, sacrificing their health and future, just to pay the rent. Family structures are crumbling as families “double-up,” fifty seniors a month hit city streets homeless, while there are more than 2,000 evictions a month because of outrageous rent hikes. More than 40 nations around the world have rent control and another 30 have some form of rent stabilization programs.
The city cannot seize living facilities and charge a decent rent but it can manipulate the market and reward those landlords whose rent increases are fair and in line with the annual cost of living increase to wages ratio. The city cannot implement official rent control because the California Apartment Owners Association bribed enough state legislators to pass the Costa-Hawkins Law in the late 90’s, which restricts the ability of local jurisdictions to implement strict rent control per se. Since that un-constitutional bill was passed (it has yet to be challenged in Federal Court) rents in some cities, including San Diego, have increased well over 50% and evictions have skyrocketed.
Each year the City of San Diego has officially declared an “affordable housing emergency” for the past 7 years and then done very little to meet that emergency. We are proposing a fee for the opportunity to continue to obtain a yearly license during an “emergency” situation. Fees would be waved for landlords who voluntarily participated in the rent stabilization program. Now, some would argue that this is a tax but according to legal experts taxes differ from fees in that paying them isn’t a matter of choice.
The Coalition for Fair Rent, which includes sympathetic homeowners and business persons, as well as religious and non-profits, is proposing the following rent stabilization program for the City of San Diego:
- An Affordable Housing Mitigation Fee of $120 per year per unit on the roughly 235,000 rental and leased units in the city, until the day there are enough units in the city to create a competitive market environment and affordable rent is at 30% of income.
- The fees would be earmarked for the affordable housing crisis only and used on such market leverage projects as land trusts and cooperative housing programs.
- The fees would be wavered for any landlord who voluntarily decided to meet the city’s Board of Rent Stabilization’s annual report on affordability – measuring cost of living increases to wage increases in the city, then, determining each year’s allowable percentage increase in rent charges.
- The Board of Rent Stabilization would also monitor and approve any additional charges above the rental or lease contract amount, such as parking fees, waste removal, pet deposits, etc. to avoid hidden increases in actual rent.
- Certain amounts of the funds from the fee would be set aside to create land trusts – property removed from the market and held by the Housing Commission – for the sole purpose of affordable housing projects and to create a public mortgage guarantee branch of the Housing Commission to encourage, help facilitate and finance the purchase of apartment buildings by tenants when the facility goes up for sale.
There are 10’s of thousands of laws, codes, ordinances, administrative decisions, tax codes, tax loopholes, rebates, deductions, and other protections for those who own property and that is as it should be…often times these are hard-earned investments.
But in all fairness, the 48% of families who pay rent or lease must be protected from exploitation or larceny if our society is to have any moral value or justification. “Whatever the market will bear” is a catchword for greed and sometimes outright theft – look at our electric costs during the de-regulation crisis as few years back, look at your health care premiums or insurance bill each month, watch the gas pump become a one armed bandit for foreign sheiks or wealthy speculators at British Petroleum (BP) owner of Arco Gas here in the U.S.
Those of us who own property must help our neighbors who pay rent or lease. We owe it to our children and grand-children to create a fair system, based on cooperation and our mutual needs for a more just and peaceful neighborhood.
Rocky Neptun