It was late in the afternoon Tuesday when Chloe arrived at the second hour of the eventual seven-hour San Diego City Council meeting. She knew she would miss tucking in her two daughters, and would be exhausted when she woke at 5:30 a.m. to get them ready for school. But she reassured herself that “this is important, my voice matters.”
Like many others in attendance, Chloe was there because she doesn’t have a large bank account, nor does she collect stock dividends. She didn’t have a lot of resources when she was waiting tables four years earlier, and she doesn’t have them now. But Chloe and those like her are being described as entitled, privileged and greedy.
Chloe was there to address evictions, specifically the “Residential Tenant Protections Ordinance to Prevent Displacement and Homelessness” proposed by Mayor Todd Gloria and Council President Sean Elo-Rivera.
This ordinance was described as giving renters “protection from eviction as long as they continue payments and otherwise comply with their lease.” The protections in it incorporate elements of Assembly Bill 1482 with enhancements including protections from day one and an increased relocation fee for no-fault evictions.
At least 65% of the landlords in San Diego are like Chloe — “mom-and-pop” owners. Like so many others, they struggled with a pandemic, supply-chain issues, health regulations, inflation, and rising maintenance costs. But in the council chambers, the sin of the landlords is that they have achieved property ownership.
According to Rivera, “Evictions in San Diego are increasing and are currently at a five-year high, which correlates with an increase in homelessness.” The assumption is that evictions create homelessness, so therefore we must restrict evictions — a worthy hypothesis but without fact-based evidence or a positive correlation.
With that in mind, let’s evaluate the idea that restricting evictions will decrease homelessness. According to Elo-Rivera’s office, data from the San Diego Regional Task Force of Homelessness is the foundation for the current tenet protection measure. So if evictions cause homelessness, it should logically follow that homelessness would start to increase with the release of any barrier to evictions.
However, while San Diego, like the rest of the country, followed strict eviction moratoriums during the recent pandemic, the data shows a decrease in the rate of first-time homeless five months after the moratoriums ended
Here’s a question to ponder. If you had a property to rent and knew that under the new ordinance it could cost you as much as $5,000 in relocation assistance to retake possession at the expiration of a lease, how strict would your criteria for renting be? How much more would you charge?
According to a 2020 study conducted by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, “a $100 increase in median rent was associated with a 9% increase in the estimated homelessness rate — even after accounting for a variety of other relevant factors, such as wages, unemployment rate, as well as other demographic and economic characteristics.”
When Chloe rents out her property, she grants one of the “bundle of rights” she has through ownership to her tenant in exchange for compensation. At no point has she released her right to the property, rather she has just agreed to a set time in which she will regain her possession.
Now the City Council wants to make her pay to get her property back — even with valid notice. How will this affect the supply of rental units?
Developers large and small lined up at the meeting to talk about the backlog of permits for new housing. According to Elyse Lowe, the director of the Development Services office, the city hired over 150 new employees in the past month specifically to address this issue and speed permits along. So why not wait on new tenant protections to see if faster permitting reduces homelessness?
No one is arguing that homelessness is not an issue. We see the encampments. We know of the impacts on seniors and refugees. I have yet to hear one person say they don’t think we need solutions and protections.
But why can’t we let existing state law under AB 1482 do its job? The unintended consequences of the proposed new tenant protections could be to make the homeless crisis worse, not better.
Mike Shenkman is a licensed broker, member of the board of directors for the Greater San Diego Association of Realtors, and a lecturer in urban studies and planning at UC San Diego.
