Rent Control Advocates Rally In San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — A group of housing advocates and proponents of Proposition 10, a local rent control initiative set for this year's November ballot, rallied outside a residential building in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood Wednesday morning.

The building at 601 O'Farrell St. is owned by Veritas Investments, which the advocates have accused of harassing tenants and evicting them in order to continue raising rents for new tenants.

The rally was part of a statewide day of action to support Prop 10, which would repeal the Costa Hawkins Rental Housing Act, a state law enacted in 1995 that limits municipal rent control ordinances. The rally also coincided with the release of a report by the San Francisco Anti-Displacement Coalition, titled "The Cost of Costa Hawkins." The report cites examples of how the Costa Hawkins Act has impacted San Francisco tenants. According to the coalition, Costa Hawkins was passed by large real estate interests to limit rent control.

"Costa Hawkins doesn't ban rent control, but it does put some really big loopholes in rent control and it really weakens what we can do at the local level," Deepa Varma with the San Francisco Tenants Union said.

"Veritas (Investments), who owns this building, who is now the largest residential landlord in San Francisco, is in a long lineage of corporate landlords that have profited off of the loopholes that Costa Hawkins has created. They're not the first. If we don't repeal Costa Hawkins, they won't be the last," Molly Goldberg, the report's author, said. "Right now they're the big players and that's why we're here outside of a Veritas
building."

Costa Hawkins restricts rent control in San Francisco multi-family units built after 1979. According to the report, the result is rent controlled housing that continues to shrink from the total rental stock in the city, as new housing is built.

Costa Hawkins also bans vacancy control, allowing landlords to raise rents on units when the lease turns over. The report alleges that the result is that subtenants are left unprotected and landlords are incentivized to evict longtime tenants.

"If Prop 10 wins, it will repeal Costa Hawkins and allow us to pass local (rent control) laws. So this report is specially about San Francisco, but we hope it will be useful all over the state, in terms of telling the story about what this law and the problems it's caused all over the state," Varma said.

"One of our other goals is to help dispel the myth that one of the reasons San Francisco is so expensive is because of rent control," she said. "We actually say no, it's because of Costa Hawkins. Rent control actually means my rent is affordable and it means most of the people here today are in their homes right now. It's only the loopholes in rent control that allow rents to go up... We're trying to help demonstrate that the cost is coming from these laws that protect profits and not from the regulations that protect tenants," she said.

According to the No on Prop 10/ Californians for Responsible Housing, the passage of Prop 10 could hurt local governments, costing them millions annually.

"The value of rental housing would decline and... rental units also would likely be sold and no longer available for rentals. Prop 10 will hurt the very people it falsely claims it will help," Steven Maviglio, spokesman for the No on Prop 10 group, said in a statement.

— Bay City News; Image by Ashley Ludwig, Patch