After four years of lawsuits and political campaigns aimed at repealing Mountain View’s rent control act, city officials plan to ask voters to give landlords their first potential win — the ability to raise rents slightly higher than the cap previously set.
The Mountain View City Council on Tuesday night voted 5-2 to approve a March 2020 ballot measure with a range of amendments to the city’s rent control ordinance, including the most contentious change — raising the annual rent-increase cap, which is currently based on the Consumer Price Index and has stayed around 3.5% the past three years, to a flat rate of 4%. Councilmembers Alison Hicks and Lucas Ramirez dissented.
Some city officials and landlords in the crowd Tuesday night said the change would make the city’s rent control act, which was passed in November 2016, more sustainable for both tenants and landlords going forward. Vice Mayor Margaret Abe-Koga, who supported the proposed amendments, characterized them as an attempt to “incentivize housing providers to stay in the market and not take their rental units off.”
Over the past four years, landlords of approximately 1,040 apartments in Mountain View have sent tenants notices to vacate due to plans to develop their properties, according to the city’s data. As the housing stock ages, landlords are increasingly selling their properties to developers who then submit plans to the city to raze rent-controlled apartments and replace them with for-sale townhouses and condominiums.
But tenants — who make up nearly 60% of the city’s population — and tenant activists argue that there’s no basis behind the idea that raising the rent cap will stop a growing trend of landlords selling their properties for development. Instead, they see the council’s proposed change as an effort to undermine an ordinance that was passed by an overwhelming number of voters but many of the councilmembers did not support.
“From the standpoint of tenants, there’s nothing in the proposed amendment that’s going to benefit them,” said resident Philip Castro. “And yet, here we are going to a great deal of work to craft changes to Measure V.”
The city’s rent control ordinance has been a source of major dispute since it was first enacted in 2016.
Less than a month after voters approved it, a group representing the city’s landlords — the California Apartment Association — filed a lawsuit to overturn it. Although the group eventually dropped the suit, the fight against the city’s rent control ordinance has raged on.
Last year, the same landlord group gathered enough signatures to put their own initiative on either the March or November 2020 ballots that would undo nearly all of the provisions outlined by the current act. The initiative — known as the “Mountain View Homeowner, Renter and Taxpayer Protection Initiative” — would, in part, limit tenant protections to households that make less than the city’s median income and suspend the program if more than 3 percent of the city’s rental units are vacant.
Councilmember Chris Clark, who was part of the subcommittee tasked with developing the ordinance amendments, said he saw the amendments as a way to “reach an equilibrium” within the community after years of dispute.
“We go through this really divisive period as a community every two or four years where two sides that frankly don’t trust each other at all are at each other’s throats, and it’s not good for anyone and a whole bunch of money, in my opinion, is wasted,” Clark said.
That divisiveness was at the front stage of the nearly five-hour-long council meeting on Tuesday night.
Carol Meyer, the owner of a small apartment complex in Mountain View, said that she was forced to consider selling her units because rent control has impeded on her ability to maintain her units and still turn a profit.
“You don’t want to be so heavy-handed in your efforts to try and help people who have income problems,” Meyer warned the council. “You don’t want to sit there and put all that burden on just a small subclass of Mountain View owners.”
Lenny Siegel, former Mountain View mayor and a member of the Housing Justice Coalition, spoke on behalf of the tenants, calling the idea that the rent cap increase would lead to fewer landlords leaving the market “far-fetched.”
“I’m expecting that if you have any (rent cap) increase that people who worked to pass Measure V, will work to defeat the council measure,” Siegel said. “So if you really think there’s any benefit to anything else you’re putting into this, it’s going to go down in defeat.”
In addition to the change of rent-increase cap, the March 2020 ballot measure also calls for streamlining the rent control law’s petition process and allowing landlords to more easily collect reimbursement for certain maintenance and improvement projects. The proposed amendments — like the current ordinance — will not cover residents living in mobile homes.