Honorable Senator Scott D. Wiener:
Bay Area Homeowners Network (BAHN) strongly opposes AB 1482, attempts to implement Rent Control statewide in California. AB 1482 will make the California housing crisis worse. Rent control laws have been proven to hurt renters and housing providers alike. Cities implementing rent control, such as San Francisco and Oakland, have suffered from unintended and harmful consequences. Please do not let the cancer of rent control spread from those failed cities to the entire State of California. We implore you to save California by voting NO on AB 1482.
Please respect the will of the people of California. Prop 10, the state-wide rent control initiative, was resoundingly and sensibly defeated by the people of California in 2018. Please do not try to circumvent that will of the people.
- AB 1482 will create uncertainty, and thus discourage mom-and-pop property owners from providing rental units to the market. Once the door of state-wide rent control opens, it is hard to predict where rent control will go. Uncertainty discourages housing. Hesitant housing providers mean anxious renters.
- City-level rent control laws destroy cities. State-level rent control laws destroy California. Under populist and irrational local rent control ordinances of, for example, San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland, mom-and-pop property owners suffer from regulated rental price versus unbridled increase in cost of repair, taxation and insurance. Renters suffer there too, due to scarcity of available rental units, and high rent. AB 1482 will make the housing market of the entire State of California like the dysfunctional housing market of San Francisco, Berkeley or Oakland.
- AB 1482 is arbitrary and irrational. Any rent caps, no matter how “reasonable” the authors claim, purposefully deprive owners of a return equitable to market costs. This gap widens over the length of the tenancy, especially for those with a very low base rent prior to rent cap taking effect. If the authors of AB 1482 claim that “CPI + 7%” is fair to renters and housing providers alike, then allowing local caps, such as “60% CPI” in San Francisco, is preposterously unfair. To solve California’s housing problem, we urge this legislative body to preemptively eliminate ruinous local ordinances with below-CPI caps on rent increases, and thus encourage more rental units to be released to those in need.
- AB 1482 unreasonably restricts local communities from exploring effective housing policies as opposed to being dictated to suffer from the failures of rent control. California is a large and diverse state. One size does not fit all. Fremont, for example, has a non-binding mediation program that effectively resolves tenancy conflicts and promotes community harmony. Please encourage local governments to explore such successes.
- AB 1482, by indiscriminately targeting a group of people, namely housing providers, regardless of what they do, will divide, rather than unite, our society. Housing provider profiling, as AB 1482 promotes, is deeply troubling, encourages lawsuit-chasing lawyers and donation-chasing organizations to target honest housing providers in costly and unproductive legal actions, often frivolous, based only on the fiction that all housing providers are greedy. This creates fear in housing providers and discourages people from renting out their properties. Racial discrimination hurts. Property owner discrimination hurts, too, in a same sinister way. Stop this discrimination against housing providers, which reduces housing and hurts California.
We BAHN, a mom-and-pop housing provider community in California, would like to cooperate with you and hope to be part of the solutions to benefit California’s economy and renters. We appreciate that you would listen to our voices and concerns on AB 1482. And please oppose anti-housing measures and support housing production legislation. Please vote NO on AB 1482. Thank you for your consideration.
Respectfully,
Jenny Zhao President,
Bay Area Homeowners Network
The Bay Area Homeowners Network (BAHN) is a non-profit, grassroots organization representing mom and pop rental property owners in the Bay Area. BAHN advocates property rights and housing friendly policies. It promotes education and professional development among members for their daily property management needs. It provides a platform for homeowners to connect and help each other. Its mission is to help members achieve greater success in their rental housing business.