Sebastopol City Council passes temporary cap on rent hikes

The Sebastopol City Council on Tuesday adopted an emergency ordinance capping rent increases at 3 percent a year for qualifying residential units, with members saying they were moved to act, in part, by a flurry of recent rate hikes in apparent response to the city’s decision to explore rent control and other potential tenant protections.

The moratorium, adopted by a 4-1 vote, takes effect immediately and lasts for 45 days but can be extended twice, for a period totaling two years.

The council came up one vote short of the four votes needed to make the moratorium retroactive to Oct. 18. That means the rate cap will not protect tenants informed over the past several days that their housing costs will be rising.

Councilman Patrick Slayter was the sole voice opposing a moratorium altogether on the grounds that it would affect only a fraction of the city’s rental units and, thus, put likely pressure on those who occupy rental stock with unregulated rates.

“I’m worried that property owners of those units will see an opportunity to stop being good rental owners, and that those rents will spike - that all we’re doing is transferring the problem from one type of rental unit to another,” Slayter said.

But others said they wanted to protect as many tenants as they could given the evidence in Sebastopol and elsewhere that landlords faced with the prospect of rent control measures often raise rents in order to establish a high base rate from which future rates would be calculated.

Councilman Robert Jacob, who first arranged to have the issue put on the council agenda, said the moratorium is designed to prevent reactive rate hikes while the council decides what, if anything, it wants to do about skyrocketing rental prices.

“I feel like this evening we’ve heard from a lot of landlords,” he said, referencing a handful of property owners who spoke of keeping their rents below market rate in order to retain tenants and ensure rates remain affordable.

But “my concern is that not every landlord is so good, and many landlords do raise rents at exorbitant rates,” Jacob said. “This is not an end all, be all. This is about there being a cap on 3 percent increases on rent per year while the city council reviews options around rent stabilization (and) just-cause evictions.”

The ordinance was approved by Jacob, Mayor Sarah Glade Gurney, Vice Mayor Una Glass and Councilman John Eder. It includes a provision allowing landlords to petition for relief from the rent-hike restrictions because of exceptional circumstances - say, a leaky roof, plumbing problem or some other expensive repair.

Under state law, the ordinance applies only to older, multi-family residential buildings built and certified for occupancy prior to February 1995.

Newer buildings are exempt, as are single-family homes and condominiums for which separate title is held. Also exempted are duplexes and owner-occupied triplexes, government subsidized housing and units vacated by one tenant and replaced by another.

City Manager/Attorney Larry McLaughlin said the city staff had not yet determined how many of the city’s roughly 1,800 rental units would be effected, but stakeholders have estimated between 88 and 350 would qualify. That makes the moratorium “an inequitable solution,” one local property owner said, “to exempt the 1,500 and lean on the very few, including me.”

But several tenants also spoke, including one woman whose voice broke as she described having her rent raised $650 before her landlord evicted her and raised the rent another $450.

Another resident, Todd Swindell, described being forced to vacate a rental, along with family and friends from the same building, after the owner died. The new landlord raised the rent by 75 percent, he said.

“We must treat it like a crisis,” Swindell said.

The discussion was driven by a housing crisis plaguing most of the Bay Area. Sebastopol’s rental market has only about a 1 percent vacancy rate. About 1,160 households, or 65 percent of renting households, are paying 30 percent or more of their income on housing.

“If we’re going to take care of as many people as we can, we need to move forward with this,” Glass said.

The council is expected to return to the issue in a meeting early next month.

You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan at 707-521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com. ?On Twitter @MaryCallahanB.