Close to Home: Rent control: What’s a city council to do?

“This possibly could be my toughest decision in my seven years on council.”

These anguished words were reportedly spoken by Santa Rosa City Councilman Gary Wysocky after hearing stories of people being evicted because they couldn’t cover enormous hikes in their rent (“SR rejects pause on rent hikes, OKs aid,” June 10).

“There a lot of good landlords,” Wysocky said, “and there’s also a lot of people who are just greedy.”

Wysocky was not alone in his anguish. “Nobody deserves to be gouged in this community,” said Councilwoman Erin Carlstrom, whose own rent recently increased by $400.

What’s a city council to do? Surely there must be some way to keep landlords from gouging our citizens?

And this is how, with the best of intentions, our leaders voted to consider one of the least-respected policies known to economists: rent control.

Economists are surprisingly united on the subject of rent control: a 1992 poll by the American Economic Association found 93 percent of economists in agreement: “A ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available.” Abundant studies illustrate these effects from New York to Los Angeles, but few examples are more compelling than San Francisco and Berkeley, where tenants are being evicted en masse as rent-controlled apartment buildings are being bought up and converted to condominiums.

Well over half of the speculators own these buildings for less than a year. While evicted tenants receive modest compensation for their trouble, those affordable units are lost forever. Rather than encouraging investment in the rental market, rent control drives capital into housing benefiting wealthier consumers.

Despite this dubious legacy, rent control is coming back. Last week, Richmond became the first California municipality in 30 years to pass a rent control ordinance. This so-called “second wave” ordinance contains measures meant to correct problems associated with the traditional model: It applies only to units built before 1995, provides exemptions for landlords making capital improvements and seeks to prevent abuses such as the hoarding of rent-controlled units among relatives or friends (another way in which rent control shifts affordable housing away from the most needy).

But Richmond’s ordinance doesn’t solve the problem of condo conversions, which is a matter for the Legislature. State Sen. Mark Leno’s efforts on behalf of those evicted renters have failed two years running. Plus, the cost of implementation will be charged entirely to the landlords, who will likely pass those costs on to tenants in the form of deferred maintenance. This “second wave,” unfortunately, doesn’t look much better than the first.

So what is a city council to do? There are a variety of measures being studied, aimed at increasing the supply of affordable housing - but thousands of affordable units need to be built to make even a dent in average rents.

In the meantime, perhaps a soft-power approach should be applied to the problem of greedy landlords. By soft power, I mean shame. Use social media to publish the names of any landlord who raises someone’s rent above, say, 15 percent or 20 percent. Grant aggrieved tenants the right to a hearing when they are being gouged. Force landlords to stand before the public and explain why they had to double the rent on a home health aid or a kindergarten teacher. Let’s move beyond anguish to outright ridicule, if that’s what it takes to keep another working family from being kicked to the curb.

Most landlords do have a conscience - though some apparently need a map to find it. Let’s give them one - and keep the pressure on. But let’s not return to policies that have been proven to fail.

The Rev. Matthew Lawrence, the former rector of Incarnation Episcopal Church in Santa Rosa, was a housing policy analyst and management consultant for low-income housing agencies prior to his ordination.