More changes affecting Santa Ana tenants and landlords are in the works for 2023.
Santa Ana — Orange County’s first city to adopt rent control and eviction protections — plans to create a Rental Housing Board and a registry of rentals in the city.
By next July, city officials plan to create a new seven-member board that will oversee the enforcement of the city’s rent control law and offer both tenants and landlords a place to resolve some disputes outside of court.
Meanwhile, a new rental registry will serve as a database of the city’s rentals and track rent increases. Landlords will be required to register their units annually and then pay a fee for that registration. Those yet-to-be-determined fees — a part of which can be passed on to some tenants — will help pay for the program. Fullerton-based Revenue & Cost Specialists will be hired to conduct a study and determine what those fees should look like, said Judson Brown, the city’s housing division manager.
“The rental registry fee will be as low and lean as possible to not create an unnecessary burden on landlords and tenants,” Brown said Tuesday.
The changes are part of a series of amendments the City Council adopted in October to the year-old rent control and eviction protection ordinances, which have since been combined into one law.
Community advocates say the changes will strengthen tenants’ rights and protections.
“Having the rent registry and the board will ensure we can keep rent control and just cause evictions in place for the long run. We’ll have a way to enforce the ordinance and fund it,” said Mextli Lopez, a volunteer with Tenants United Santa Ana, a community organization that advocates for rent control and tenant protections.
The amendments to the 2021 law will also make it easier for tenants to know whether their buildings are covered, Lopez said, “and how much their landlords can increase their rent per year.”
But some council members and apartment owner representatives say the city created an expensive and confusing “bureaucracy.”
“The city needs more housing units — not more bureaucracy,” said Joshua Howard, a spokesman for the California Apartment Association.
“Rather than focus on building affordable homes, the city is wasting time making a complicated law even worse by creating a costly and complex bureaucracy to regulate the very industry that provides homes for Santa Ana families,” Howard said in an email Monday.
The California Apartment Association has objected to the new rules since the council began discussing the matter in earnest in 2021, following years of community advocacy and after a more progressive council majority was elected in 2020.
State law, critics noted, already caps annual rent increases at 5% plus inflation for homes at least 15 years old and also requires landlords to have a “just cause” to evict tenants.
The city’s rent stabilization law caps rent increases to 3% annually or 80% of inflation, whichever is less, for buildings built on or before Feb. 1, 1995, and for mobile home parks established before 1990. The local law also calls for “just cause evictions,” limiting when landlords can force out tenants who have occupied a property for at least 30 days. Owners of homes and mobile homes may petition for a rent increase in excess of the maximum allowed “in order to obtain a fair and reasonable return on their property.”
On Oct. 18, following discussions at earlier meetings, the City Council voted 4-3 to approve amendments to its law that included creating a new registry of rental units as well as a Rental Housing Board, which will consist of three tenants — including a mobile home tenant — two landlords and two at-large members with no financial interest.
Councilmembers Phil Bacerra and David Penaloza, along with then-Councilwoman Nelida Mendoza, questioned unknown costs and whether it was prudent to pass on as much as half of a rental’s registration fee to tenants.
“We’re assessing fees on people who can’t really pay their rent. That’s how I see it,” Mendoza said at an Oct. 4 meeting.
Bacerra called the council’s move irresponsible.
Councilwoman Thai Viet Phan countered those arguments, saying: “This program helps low-income people because rent stabilization has ensured that so many of our tenants are not skipping meals … skipping medications, to pay for housing.”
Phan voted for the amendments along with Councilmembers Johnathan Ryan Hernandez, Jessie Lopez and then-Mayor Vicente Sarmiento.
Other recent changes approved to the Rent Stabilization and Just Cause Eviction ordinance include:
— A landlord may request to “pass-through” costs of improving a rental unit to the tenant;
— Tenants may petition to have various issues reviewed, such as rent increases, “pass-through” costs or to complain about their rental’s habitability; and
— Voluntary mediation services will be available with a neutral third party beginning Oct. 1, 2023.
In the first year of the program, the city paid $300,000 to a company called RSG Inc. in Irvine to provide consulting services related to the rent control and just cause eviction law. The company created and disseminated information about the ordinances, held workshops and, among other things, assisted over 2,500 tenants and landlords as of July, according to a city staff report. In September, the council approved spending another $500,000 for RSG to manage and implement the new law “as needed” through September 2023.
Next year, city officials expect to amend the contract with RSG for a third year, Brown said in an email, “while the city is hiring staff in (fiscal year) ’23-24 to implement, administer, monitor, support, and enforce all of the provisions of the ordinance.”
Source: Orange County Register
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