Which Santa Rosa renters deserve protection?

Landlords in Sonoma County don’t need a reason to evict their tenants.

Even if tenants pay their rent on time and follow all the rules in the lease, property owners can still kick them out without saying why.

All landlords need to do is serve a “no cause” eviction notice, which typically gives people 30 days to leave if they’ve lived there less than a year, or 60 days if they’ve lived there longer.

Santa Rosa is considering changing that by requiring landlords have a “just cause” to evict tenants, such as failure to pay rent, violating the lease, creating a nuisance, or criminal behavior.

Advocates say forcing landlords to explain why they’re evicting someone is crucial for several reasons. They say it will prevent landlords from circumventing rent control rules by ousting existing tenants merely to raise rent on new ones.

They also argue that just-cause rules help protect renters against discrimination, such as evictions based on race ?or age, or against retaliation, such as evictions triggered by a demand for repairs.

“I think that our city should stand up and say people who are tenants have rights,” Councilmember Julie Combs said. “The way it is now, tenants’ rights are almost impossible to enforce.”

But a rift has emerged on the City Council over just how many renters deserve protection from unfair evictions.

Three council members - Mayor John Sawyer, Vice Mayor Tom Schwedhelm and Councilman Ernesto Olivares - don’t support either rent control or just-cause eviction rules of any kind, arguing that the city would be better served by focusing on building new units.

Schwedhelm on Tuesday said he worried the rules would make it harder for landlords to get rid of problem tenants and force terrified residents to testify against unsavory neighbors.

Representatives of the real estate industry have argued the proposed rules unnecessarily create an adversarial environment between tenants and landlords.

Within the four-member majority that supports renter protections, however, dissension has emerged over just how widely to cast the just-cause eviction net.

Three members - Combs, Chris Coursey and Erin Carlstrom - support extending the protections to all renters in the city, whether they live in aging apartments or in hillside homes in Fountaingrove.

But one, Gary Wysocky, supports a narrower approach. Wysocky doesn’t see the need to extend just-cause eviction protections beyond those rental units covered by the city’s rent moratorium, which temporarily caps rent increases at 3 percent per year for certain units.

The moratorium, which is limited by a state law known as Costa-Hawkins, only affects apartments built before February 1995, while exempting single-family homes, duplexes and owner-occupied triplexes. About 14,000 apartments, or 21 percent of the city’s housing stock, is currently affected by the rent freeze.

Wysocky said it makes sense to align the just-cause eviction rules with the rent-controlled units because that’s where the problem appears greatest. People getting evicted from fancy homes have other options lower-income folks don’t, he said.

“Do we need to cover every single rental unit, even at the top end of the economic spectrum?” Wysocky asked.

People in single-family homes have no real protection against rising rents, ?so landlords who want them out can just jack up their rents, he said. ?They are also more likely to have the resources to contest an unjust eviction or find a new place to live, he said.

So he thinks the city’s priority should be to help those people most at risk of being made homeless by an unfair eviction.

Wysocky blocked the effort to extend the protection to all renters last Tuesday. The limited rules are slated to go into effect Aug. 25. Advocates worry that Wysocky’s position will carry over to the permanent rent control ordinance, which the council ?is set to consider next month.

It would be a “serious gap” to have so many renters unprotected by just-cause rules, said Ronit Rubinoff, executive director of Legal Aid of Sonoma County, which is seeing a sharp increase in such evictions.

“We need just cause to help enforce a range of state rights, not just this local ordinance,” Rubinoff said.

Because of the acute housing crisis in the county, tenants are deeply fearful of asking landlords to make needed repairs because they worry they won’t be able to find another place, she said.

Rubinoff recounted the story of an elderly woman with sewage backing up into her bathtub ?who was too afraid to ask her landlord to have it fixed. “My clients view no-cause notices as a ticket to homelessness,” Rubinoff said.

Just because a unit isn’t covered by rent control doesn’t mean those people aren’t suffering from the same housing crisis putting the squeeze on residents of pre-1995 apartments, she said.

According to 2010 U.S. Census data, about ?46 percent of city housing units were rentals, or ?30,638 units. The city has estimated that there are about 13,414 units covered by the city’s rent control rules (The actual figure is likely higher because it doesn’t include an unknown number of owner-occupied triplexes).

But if the city estimate is used, that would leave 17,252 units in the city ?unprotected by just-cause requirements. Based on census estimates of household size, that means nearly 45,000 people, or 26 percent of the city’s population, would remain unprotected by just-cause rules.

In most cases, that won’t be a problem because most landlords are good, honest people, Combs said.

“I think the majority of our landlords will be completely unaffected by this,” Combs said.

But if the problem ?is bigger than he thinks, Wysocky said he’s willing to reconsider the matter.

One of the reasons he said he supports a narrower program is because he wants any future rental inspection efforts to focus on units with health and safety issues.

If it turns out that there are problems in housing exempt from Costa-Hawkins and those renters aren’t coming forward because they’re fearful of retaliation, Wysocky said he’s open to broadening the protections.

“I think we can all agree that units should be habitable,” he said.

You can reach Staff ?Writer Kevin McCallum at 707-521-5207 or kevin.mccallum@pressdemocrat.com.