July 8, 2024
The San Francisco Anti-Displacement Organization and so many other community groups citywide have come out in support of the Justice for Renters Act on the November 2024 ballot to repeal Costa-Hawkins statewide.
As organizations who daily work with tenants facing displacement due to the impacts of Costa-Hawkins, we know the importance of removing these sweeping state preemptions to our local authority. The real estate industry’s response to a nationwide wave of successful community organizing for regulation of rental housing, Costa-Hawkins creates loopholes in tenant protections that leave tens of thousands of residents unprotected from massive rent increases and displacement. Our 2018 report “The Cost of Costa Hawkins” describes these loopholes and their impacts in greater detail.
It is no surprise that the Real Estate industry has come out again in full force to oppose the repeal of this measure, as they have for similar attempts in the past. The passage of the Costa-Hawkins Act in 1995 marked over a decade of continuous effort by the real estate lobby to overturn tenant protections they could not stop at the local level. The 1970s saw a period of massive inflation paired with stagnating wages and rising unemployment. Cost of living, including housing costs, skyrocketed. By the late 1970s, rent control laws had been passed in 170 municipalities across the country. Unable to stop tenant momentum in cities with organized renters, the real estate industry looked for ways to override local initiatives via state preemptions. Despite success in many states nationwide, they were not able to fully ban rent control in Sacramento, so the industry attempted to weaken it via the Costa-Hawkins Act. Initially introduced in 1983, the bill failed every year until 1995, when the industry’s persistent lobbying finally paid off. It has been a priority of tenant advocates to repeal the anti-tenant legislation ever since.
Costa-Hawkins drives up the price of housing for everyone in the city. Mandated vacancy decontrol means that sales prices for rent control buildings reflect an assumption that a large percentage of long-term rent control units can be flipped to market rate. Counselors and lawyers regularly see tenants facing persistent harassment because their landlords want to empty their unit and raise the rent, including long-term tenants who are not deemed as “original tenants” by the law’s definition. The city’s largest landlords build this presumption into their business plans, often relying on illegal methods to circumvent tenant protections and rent control, and pricing smaller “mom and pop” landlords out of the market.
Tenants regularly visit our clinics seeking help because a massive rent increase will force them to move from their home of many decades but they are not covered by rent control because Costa-Hawkins labels their 40-year-old unit “new construction.” The ban on extending common-sense rent regulations to “new construction” means that rent controlled housing has declined from over 90% of the rental stock when rent control passed to less than 70% of the stock at last count several years ago. Rent control housing is the single largest source of affordable units in the city, but over 86,000 units are unregulated simply because those buildings were constructed after 1979. Today, one-third of tenants are rent burdened. For very low-income renters, that number jumps to over 60%.
A June 17th letter of opposition to a local resolution in support of Proposition 33 submitted by an unsurprising alliance of the San Francisco Apartment Association, San Francisco Association of Realtors, market rate housing developers, and CA Yimby, makes familiar arguments against rent control. For decades, opponents of rent control have claimed that we won’t build the new housing we desperately need if rent control is expanded, but a survey of the academic literature points to rent control having no effect on housing production. For example, a 2006 study on new construction in the Bay Area found rent-controlled cities built nearly twice as many units per resident as their non-rent controlled neighbors. A 2023 letter to the Federal Housing Finance Agency, signed by 32 economists in support of national rent control, cites “substantial empirical evidence that rent regulation policies do not limit new construction, nor the overall supply of housing.”
Proposition 33, the Justice for Renter’s Act is simple: it returns authority to cities and counties to enact and enforce regulations on rental housing that local jurisdictions deem necessary. The measure is backed by tenant and community groups, organized labor, veterans, seniors, LGBTQ advocates, and many others statewide. We hope voters across San Francisco will join this broad coalition in support of this common sense measure that will allow us to pass the rent controls we need to ensure that San Francisco is a place where all of our communities can imagine and secure a future.
The following organizations signed on to our July 8 letter to the Board of Supervisors in support of a local resolution calling for the passage of Proposition 33:
Affordable Housing Alliance
Aids Legal Referral Panel
Asian Law Caucus
Bill Sorro Housing Program
California Community Land Trust Network
Causa Justa :: Just Cause
Eviction Defense Collaborative
Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco
Jobs With Justice SF
National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW)
People Organized to Win Employment Rights (PODER)
Race and Equity in All Planning Coalition (REP-SF)
San Francisco Community Land Trust
San Francisco Housing Development Corporation
San Francisco Senior and Disability Action
San Francisco Tenants Union
South of Market Community Action Network (SOMCAN)
SOMA Pilipinas, the Filipino Cultural Heritage District
TODCO
United to Save the Mission
West Side Tenants Association
Young Community Developers (YCD)
