MyNewPlace Blog

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom (left) and Supervisor Chris Daly (right)

Yesterday, Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco announced that he plans to veto a set of renter protection laws authored by Supervisor Chris Daly and passed by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors last week. The Renters Economic Relief Package includes:

• Prohibiting rent increases that puts a tenant's rent over 33 percent if the tenant is unemployed, has had his or her wages cut or is living on a fixed income.
• Makes the San Francisco Housing Code the final authority on how many roommates may occupy a given rental property based on square footage and number of bedrooms, allowing renters to add roommates to help pay the rent.
• Limit the amount of “banked" annual rent increases that a landlord may impose to 8 percent.

These measures were offered by Supervisor Chris Daly as a way to help renters who have lost their jobs, or have had their benefits or wages cut keep their apartment homes. Mayor Newsom, however, promised to veto the measures, prompting a rally on the Capitol Steps yesterday at noon.

San Francisco has an unusual rental market. The city itself has a high rental population (about 2/3) and consistent low vacancy rates. Demand is kept high by a steady stream of new residents from around the nation who move to a city that is located at the tip of a peninsula that is only 7×7 miles. However, San Francisco also has a long history of being a very tenant-friendly city, with very strict rent-control measures and a tenant friendly rent board. Without rent control and a prominent tenant's union, the unregulated San Francisco rental market would be very different; Rents would be higher, apartments would be nicer and neighborhoods would be much more ‘economically defined.'

The Renters Economic Relief Package passed by the Board of Supervisors was watered down from its original version, which extended the 33 percent of income cap to all renters. 30 percent of income is about the recommended percentage of income that people should spend on housing. The federal Section 8 housing voucher program works on that supposition. Low income families pay 30 percent of their income toward rent and the federal government pays the difference between that and the market rate. The proposed measure would place that cost of that difference on the backs of rental property owners and landlords instead of on the entire taxpayer base (as with the Section 8 Housing Voucher Program).

The second measure allows renters to invite as many roommates as the San Francisco Housing Code will allow without allowing the landlord to raise rent. If this were enacted, landlords would lose the ability to regulate the number of tenants in their own apartments.

The third measure prohibits rental property owners from saving up their annual rent increase allowances and imposing them all in one year. This is designed to prevent landlords who have not raised rents over the past ten years to all of a sudden jack up rents on tenants (this year especially). However, rent control, which was enacted in 1979 to combat high inflation spurred especially high by the Bay area's property prices, is only about 2 percent a year and therefore would require that landlord had saved up their allowable percentage increases for many years.

All perspectives considered, the measures protect the most vulnerable renters, but does so at the expense of rental property owners and landlords, but in doing so, may be more of a band aid solution.

What do you think? Is the proposed Rental Economic Relief Package necessary? Is it fair?

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