PD Editorial: Santa Rosa council searches for housing answers

By its actions in recent days, the Santa Rosa City Council is showing it wants to get serious about confronting the local housing crisis.

What it’s going to do, however, is still unclear.

To buy time, the council on Tuesday considering a moratorium on rent increases of more than 3 percent on apartments built before 1995. But faced with a number of angry landlords and apartment managers who complained that there wasn’t enough time for public input, the council wisely backed down, although four of seven council members were ready to move forward. The measure needed five votes to pass.

But the concern remains that soaring rents at all levels are having a snowball effect, one that’s rolling over low-income people in particular.

Councilwoman Julie Combs, who brought the moratorium to the council, said she was concerned that rising rents had caused a “public health problem with people getting kicked out of their apartments.”

Instead of halting rent increases, which would affect the market at all income levels, council members voted to help homeless people find shelter. They agreed to spend nearly $500,000 on added homeless services, including a round-the-clock hotline for those facing homelessness and a voucher program to help people find a temporary place to stay, such as a hotel or a camp site. The city services would operate in conjunction with a county program that began last year as a partnership between Catholic Charities of Santa Rosa, Social Advocates for Youth and Buckelew Programs, a nonprofit homeless services group. The county’s new Homeless Outreach Services Team also operates with support from the Sheriff’s Office and the Santa Rosa Police Department.

But these initiatives deal primarily with the symptoms, not the disease itself. The fundamental problem is a shortage of housing, particularly the kind available to those on the low end of the income spectrum. And with few housing units in the pipeline, scarcity is driving up rents.

Some landlords kept rents flat, or even cut rents, during the years around the Great Recession. But increases are kicking in to match market demand, they say.

As Councilman Gary Wysocky noted, “There are a lot of good landlords; there’s also a lot of people who are just greedy.”

The challenge is coming up with a solution that creates legal obstacles for the greedy landlords without hurting the rest. The council’s consideration of rental control wasn’t surprising, but the experiences of other cities demonstrate that rent control comes with a host of unintended consequences.

Where the council can make an immediate and significant impact is in an area that it already promised to address - helping those with Section 8 vouchers find housing. The vouchers, provided by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, are administered by the city and provide subsidies for low-income renters in market-rate housing.

These vouchers typically pay about 30 percent to 40 percent of the rent while tenants cover the balance, up to certain maximums. But a survey last month by Homeless Action, a housing advocacy organization, found that few landlords in Sonoma County are accepting the subsidies any more.

There are roughly 1,800 people in the city who receive such vouchers, which average in size at about $750 a month.

One of the things that apparently discourages landlords from taking Section 8 tenants is that the federal government is slow to raise the caps on the subsidies. But that’s a poor excuse for locking low-income renters out of the market.

Santa Rosa officials need to find out more from property owners and landlords as to why they are no longer considering Section 8 tenants. But the primary goal should be to follow in the steps of cities such as Santa Monica and Corte Madera in coming up with legal protections against this kind of housing discrimination.

It’s a better first step than a sweeping moratorium which, in the long run, could make the region’s housing problem, at least for low-income residents, worse, not better.