Opinion: Why so-called ‘tenant protection ordinances’ don’t work
Apartments in downtown San Diego File photo by Chris Stone Times of San Diego In the past couple of years several local cities including San Diego Imperial Beach and Chula Vista have enacted laws that are known as tenant protection ordinances on top of California s tenant protections which are already the strictest in the nation So why did another local City Council in recent days vote against creating a TPO In Oceanside City Councilmember Rick Robinson reversed his vote on a proposed TPO that would have gone beyond state law His honesty was refreshing and his reasoning was exactly right Robinson explained that while the ordinance was well-intentioned What we did is not going to keep people in their homes He declared he listened to the small mom-and-pop landlords in his district In the end he concluded that adding more local rules and red tape doesn t solve the real difficulty He s right And now national research shows just how costly these regulations can be for renters A examination distributed this summer confirms what housing providers in San Diego already know overregulation increases rents especially for lower-income renters and those in small properties How much does rent go up It turns out that eviction laws such as TPOs are estimated to increase rents about per unit annually in the San Diego metropolitan area according to analysis author MetroSight The survey which was sponsored by the National Apartment Association and National Multifamily Housing Council analyzed figures from hundreds of metro areas That means the Oceanside ordinance wouldn t have prevented displacement It would have made rents higher across the board Those costs hit hardest at lower-income renters and people living in small apartment buildings exactly the populations these laws claim to protect Politicians designed these duplicative laws to create mounds of paperwork going so far as to specify the font size of notices that landlords must provide to renters In fact Southern California Rental Housing Association had to create different forms in addition to normal leasing documents just to keep members compliant across three cities In San Diego County we re already seeing the effects of overlapping local ordinances layered on top of strict statewide laws For corporate landlords with compliance departments that s burdensome but realizable For smaller landlords it s discouraging Robinson s change of heart should be a wake-up call We all want stable housing We all want to prevent homelessness But pretending that more red tape will accomplish that is misleading What really works is building more housing and supporting programs that keep people whole such as local rental assistance and shallow subsidies for seniors Those strategies lower rents increase supply and give families real stability The MetroSight inquiry confirms what housing providers have commented for years regulations that go beyond state law don t help renters they hurt them Landlords are tired of being scapegoated for program failures No amount of finger-pointing at landlords will fix the fact that we haven t built enough housing and that state and local regulations have driven up the cost of the homes we do have As fingers are pointed at landlords it s significant to note that preponderance local cities are way behind on meeting their own state housing goals San Diego for example has only approved about new homes since less than one-third of the homes it is supposed to add between and Policymakers who are serious about affordability should follow Robinson s example It s time to admit that punitive local ordinances are the wrong tool Alan Pentico is the executive director of the Southern California Rental Housing Association
