PD Editorial: Looking for ways to limit rent spikes

On Tuesday night, the Santa Rosa City Council will open the door wider to a heated debate — whether to limit rent increases as a way to control the region's haywire rental housing market. Call it what you will — rent stabilization is the terminology the city is using — but no matter how you look at it, it's still rent control.

That said, no one should blame the City Council for exploring this option. As Staff Writer Kevin McCallum pointed out in his article on Sunday ('Santa Rosa's big rent control debate') renters in the city are being squeezed to unrealistic extremes, from seeing rents soar to struggling for months trying to find a rental in a market where vacancies pretty much exist only in the minutes between someone moving out and someone moving in.

Stories like that of Jen Schallert, who was told that the rent on the Sebastopol unit she was closing in on had suddenly jumped from $2,600 a month to $3,500 over night, hit a nerve with readers.

City rents have jumped some 40 percent in the past four years. As a result, the council tonight will discuss a possible program to limit rent increases to no more than 3 percent a year. The workshop will include a discussion of the legal limits on rent control in the state.

As the council hears from staff, we remain skeptical on whether Santa Rosa needs to go down this road — and what it will find when it gets there. Specifically, we believe the city's burden will be to show:

1. That this program will actually have a significant impact on the market. Because of legal restrictions, the city lacks the authority to adopt a citywide ordinance. It can only place rent limits on multi-family units built prior to 1995. According to city officials, this means a rent control ordinance would only cover about 20 percent, or 13,386, of the city's housing units. We need to be persuaded that such a narrow impact would not only make a difference but wouldn't create an unfair burden — with the possibility of reducing property values — for those covered by the ordinance.

2. Second, the city needs to show that this won't require a large new bureaucracy, which the city can ill-afford as it is just beginning to experience the benefits of a rebounding economy. According to staff, the city of Richmond, which is launching a similar program, has estimated it will need to hire between 14 and 25 people. Santa Monica, home to rent control since 1979, has a staff of 26. Much of that is funded through fees charged to landlords.

3. Finally, the city needs to have an end game in mind. What will success look like and when would the city know that it has arrived? Markets swing, and it could swing in favor of renters, possibly leaving a rental program moot.

All of this is to say the obvious, that rent control is just the symptom of a larger problem — a housing shortage.

As the city also explores options to encourage the development of affordable housing, it needs to ensure it doesn't do anything that causes more problems than benefits in the long run. We wait to be convinced.