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Tenant Groups Expand Push For Rent Control in Pasadena

Target March 2022 election for ballot initiative

Published on Friday, September 4, 2020 | 4:50 am
 
A Pasadena Tenants Union member seen during a 2018 effort by the group to collect enough signatures to qualify a rent control measure for that year’s ballot. Ultimately, that drive fell 2,112 signatures short of the needed number. The Union joined other groups to form a coalition which is now focused on the 2022 election. Image via Facebook.

A ballot initiative proposing local rent control in Pasadena by way of an amendment to the City Charter could go before city voters in March 2022 – that is, if a new grassroots campaign that kicked off Thursday night should succeed.

Ryan Bell, a member of the Pasadena Tenants Union and a former City Council candidate, said that a Thursday “Zoom” meeting hosted by the PTU was the “first of many” such presentations his group and the larger Pasadena Tenants Justice Coalition plan to hold as they pursue a locally mandated cap on annual rent hikes in the city.

While March 2022 might seem a long way away, it would mark the next time a ballot initiative could be placed before city voters. The deadline to place an issue on this November’s ballot passed on Aug. 7.

The groups will likely need all that time anyway, as it’s no easy task to get a measure on the ballot. Doing so requires, among other things, the signatures of 15 percent of the city’s registered voters, or about 20,000 signees, allowing for invalid signatures, the PTU estimated.

“It’s going to be a lot of hard work and it’s technically complicated …[but] this is absolutely what we plan to do,’’ PTU member Zander Moss said during a presentation in which he detailed the tenant groups’ goals and timeline.

The groups are pushing for rent-increase caps of between 2 percent and 3 percent annually on existing tenancies, saying, “Rents would still increase, but more slowly than other costs of living, (allowing) wages to catch up and giving families room to breathe.”

The still-nascent proposal would also, according to Moss’s presentation, allow landlords to petition the city for “moderate increases in excess of this cap” to finance repairs and improvements.

Any new rent-control rules would not cover rents on new tenancies; under California’s Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act of 1995, “vacancy control” is prohibited, so landlords may charge whatever the market bears. Costa-Hawkins also prohibits cities from establishing rent control over single-family dwellings, condos and certain newer buildings.

According to the PTU’s figures, “57 percent of Pasadenans are renters … over 50 percent of Pasadena renters spend over 30 percent of income on rent … and 27 percent of Pasadena renters over 50 percent of income on rent.”

With rent increases tending to outpace other cost-of-living jumps, those numbers present an increasing challenge for renters, the group said.

What’s more, the group said, Blacks and Latinos are disproportionately affected, with an estimated 70 percent of Black households and 68 percent of Latino households in the city consisting of renters.

Currently, there is no city-mandated rent-control law in Pasadena, and historically little appetite among City Council members to change that.

Some (but not all) city landlords fall under the California Tenant Protection Act of 2019, or Assembly Bill 1482. Among other elements, the law limits annual rent increases to no more than 5 percent plus the local inflation rate, or 10 percent, whichever is lower.

The law went into effect on Jan. 1. However, there is a wide and complex range of exceptions within the law. That law also expires in 2030.

Last year the Pasadena City Council unanimously approved an expanded Tenant Protection Ordinance that placed a moratorium on evictions without just cause and rolled back rents retroactive to March 15 for tenants still in the eviction process.

That ordinance sunsetted on Jan. 1 after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 1482. At the time, Bell and other PTU leaders said the new state law does not do enough to protect local tenants, and that they would pursue tougher local rules through the ballot initiative.

It didn’t get done in time for this November’s ballot, and now the push is on once again.

“AB 1482 is an anti-rent gouging protection,’’ Bell told Pasadena Now in January. “We still need real rent control. Under AB 1482 rents can still increase by 8 to 9 percent annually depending on the cost of living increase for that year, which still far outstrips wage increases for the vast majority of tenants. I’m especially concerned for senior citizens who live on fixed incomes whose Social Security payments do not increase by more than 2 to 3 percent per year, if that much.”

Meanwhile, in the shorter term, many city renters are already feeling the pinch as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

With the city operating under an emergency order as a result of the pandemic, the council earlier this year passed an eviction moratorium, giving some safeguards to those who have accumulated back rent as a result of being hurt economically by the pandemic.

While the state Legislature voted this week to require tenants to pay 25 percent of back rent not paid during the state’s eviction moratorium for the remainder of the year, Pasadena’s local moratorium still applies.

“Landlords may not pursue no-fault evictions or evictions for non-payment of rent for tenants who can’t afford to pay because of the pandemic,” the city said Monday.

However, the city moratorium still requires all back rent to be paid within six months of the city lifting the emergency, though landlords cannot charge late fees.

In public comments at several recent City Council meetings, numerous local housing advocates have pushed for rent forgiveness for those who have been unable to pay rent as a result of the pandemic. That subject was not raised during Thursday’s “Zoom” meeting.

PTU leaders, meanwhile, said they plan to reach out for volunteer signature-gatherers and other volunteers, as well as for funding from local progressive organizations, as they pursue their longer-term rent-control push. The PTU’s website is http://pasadenatenantsunion.org/en/

— André Coleman contributed to this report

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