Sebastopol City Council advances study of rent control

The Sebastopol City Council has voted to move forward with a look at measures to protect renters, including potential limits on rent increases and evictions, a move that is likely to be divisive in the community and could prove influential in next month’s election, with four candidates vying for two seats.

The decision Tuesday included a 3-2 vote in favor of considering an emergency freeze on residential rents to guard against sudden, reactive rate hikes while the debate is underway. That split decision alone reflected the deep public division over rent control inside and outside City Hall and uncertainty on the council about how to proceed in addressing a regionwide housing crisis.

Council members were unanimous nonetheless in saying it was time to learn about options to help ensure the elderly and other economically vulnerable members of their community weren’t driven out by skyrocketing housing prices.

“I think it’s just as likely that it’s a bad answer as that it‘s a good answer,” Councilman John Eder said after hearing from 20 residents, evenly split for and against the potential provisions. “I think we should at least have the opportunity to take a look at it.”

Sebastopol would be the second city in Sonoma County to pursue limits on rent increases and evictions should it decide to do so as soon as next month. A split Santa Rosa council approved rent control in the city in late August, but that law has been suspended since rent control opponents filed a petition seeking repeal of the measure or a public referendum.

The debate, simmering throughout Sonoma County and the Bay Area, has boiled up in Sebastopol at the end of an election cycle in which two council incumbents who were among the three-member majority in favor of considering an emergency freeze on rents - Eder and Robert Jacob - are not running for re-election. They were joined by Vice Mayor Una Glass in directing City Manager/Attorney Larry McLaughlin to draw up a draft ordinance on an urgency moratorium to consider at the council’s Nov. 1 meeting.

Mayor Sarah Gurney and Councilman Patrick Slayter opposed the move to consider a rent freeze, citing the short time frame in which the city would have to act and a large volume of pressing city business to be addressed before year’s end.

“I’m just not convinced that doing this as an urgency is going to create a good work product from us,” Gurney said.

Further discussion of tenant protections was scheduled for Dec. 20 as part of a broad effort to tackle the issue of housing affordability that council members said they would undertake going forward.

By December, however, both Eder’s and Jacob’s council terms will have expired. Their seats will be filled by the two candidates who prevail in the ?Nov. 8 election, inheriting the new housing policy debate, which Jacob put on the agenda.

One of the candidates, Michael Carnacchi, was among those conceding that the outgoing members weren’t making it easy for whoever assumes their seats. “They kind of dropped it right in our lap,” Carnacchi said with a chuckle.

All four council candidates - Jonathan Greenberg, Craig Litwin, Neysa Hinton and Carnacchi - have cited housing affordability as a priority in their campaigns.

But none was prepared Wednesday to embrace rent control and just cause-eviction regulations without a better understanding of the potential for unintended consequences, like exploding rents on housing that’s exempt from local provisions by state law.

“I would hate to see that happen,” Greenberg said. “I’ve seen that happen.”

Sebastopol’s decision comes as Bay Area housing has grown increasingly more unaffordable for low- and middle-income renters, with various factors seen behind the skyrocketing costs, including inadequate supply and withdrawal of units for use as short-term vacation rentals and second homes.

But even in communities where voters this fall are considering new measures to cap annual rent hikes and require landlords to show just cause before they evict a tenant, state law exempts housing built after 1995, as well as single-family homes, condominiums, duplexes, owner-occupied triplexes and government subsidized housing.

Daniel Sanchez, government affairs director at the North Bay Association of Realtors, a vocal rent control opponent, told the Sebastopol council that his quick calculations showed only 88 of the city’s nearly 3,500 housing units would be eligible for tenant protections.

Another speaker, Mallori Spilker, vice president of public affairs for the North Coast division of the California Apartment Association, said her calculations put the figure closer to 350. But the larger problem, she and others said, is that market pressures and fear of further regulation often pushes unregulated rentals prices much higher than they already are.

Sebastopol real estate agent Ann Harris said Santa Rosa’s adoption of rent control had driven away would-be investors in apartment buildings, with the result that some units have been withdrawn from rental stock.

But many in attendance at Tuesday’s meeting supported the move to explore tenant protection measures.

Even if it’s 88 units, “have the courage to do something to help those people,” North Bay Organizing Project President Omar Medina said.

Sebastopol resident Annie Dobbs-Kramer, also with the North Bay Organizing Project and a manager of family rental property, said it’s possible to get a reasonable rate of return without gouging renters.

“I think that this is ultimately a question of values,” she said. “What are our values as a community? Do we value a few people making a lot of money, or do we value diversity of all kinds? Our families staying together? Children staying in school?”

Many also supported the moratorium on rent hikes.

“We all saw what happened in Santa Rosa,” said Paprika Clark of Sebastopol. “As soon as this discussion began, landlords panicked and started to kick people out for absolutely no cause” so they could raise their rates.

Hinton, the council candidate, said she wished the City Council had waited to act until after they saw how things shook out in Santa Rosa, or at least until the election was over and the new council makeup was decided.

Jacob, who said he had been thinking about asking the council to consider tenant protections for about six months, apologized publicly for what he conceded was “sort of bad timing,” but said the number of people losing their homes made it an urgent matter.

“For me, it doesn’t matter how many units are affected,” Jacob said, “because the units that are affected house our most vulnerable population.”