We Get Letters: Why I Support the Rent Control Initiative

It’s been a while since I was a renter but it’s an experience I haven’t forgotten—worrying whether I’d have my rent together by the first of the month, anxious about asking for repairs for fear my landlord would raise my rent, and knowing that within a few days I could be looking for a new place to live.

Those memories came rushing back to me as I listened to the Pasadena City Council debate this week on whether to take a position on the Pasadena Fair and Equitable Housing charter amendment that members of this community—mostly tenants themselves— placed on the ballot. They collected over 15,000 signatures from voters. There’s a good chance yours is one of them.

To listen to several city councilmembers talk about the charter amendment on Monday night you would never know it directly affects tens of thousands of Pasadena residents and not just a few hundred landlords. They spoke of landlords profits, costs of implementation (which are minimal), capital flows…everything except people. Families, seniors, people who are barely hanging on. A quarter of renters are paying more than half their income in rent! The fastest growing population of houseless individuals in Pasadena are senior citizens! According to the 2022 homeless count, “seniors were also much more likely to point to eviction or foreclosure as an event that precipitated homelessness (28% v. 6%). For those evicted, 80% of the evictions occurred in Pasadena.”

I was deeply moved by the dozens of community members who called in to ask city council to support the charter amendment. There were familiar names, but also many people who were new to me, telling stories of horrific living conditions, landlord harassment, and large rent increases.

When I was a renter it was easier to buy a first home and make the transition from paying someone else’s mortgage to paying my own. When my wife Sona and I bought our first home in Pasadena, a two bedroom one bath home in East Pasadena, the sale price was $108,000, roughly 2 times my annual income. Today, the median income for Pasadena is about $85,000 per year and the median sale price of a house is $1.15 million. That’s 13.5 times the median annual income. Increasingly, people just can’t do it.

Meanwhile, rents have risen through the roof. Today, median rent for a 1-bedroom apartment in Pasadena is $1854 and a 2-bedroom is $2,397. That is a 17% increase since early 2020, before the pandemic began, and a 15.3% increase just since last year according to Apartment List data.

Of course, as time goes by, everything gets more expensive, but rent has outpaced the general cost of living, measured by the Consumer Price Index, for decades. And that is on top of the fact that the cost of rent is a major factor in the Consumer Price Index itself.

That is why rent control is so essential. Fear not, landlords will always make a profit if they run their businesses with even a modicum of professionalism. Their profits are protected by decades of case law and the takings clause in the U.S. Constitution. What rent control does is limit excessive profits that tear apart communities and financially crush families. This is a time tested set of policies that have been in place for decades in cities across California. These policies successfully protect the majority of our community from predatory landlord behavior—arbitrary evictions and rent increases that force people out.

William M. Paparian
Attorney at Law

Got something to say, email Managing Editor André Coleman, at andrec@pasadenanowmagazine.com