People should feel safe and secure in their homes. It’s a critical part of health and happiness. But at the moment more than 113,000 San Jose residents are facing displacement from their homes, with a further 155,000 people at risk, according to UC Berkeley’s urban displacement project.
The problem of displacement, evictions and skyrocketing rents is an urgent priority for San Jose and numerous other places in California; it demands immediate action.
That is why it was astonishing to read that The Mercury News and the East Bay Times call for the State Senate to kill Assemblyman David Chiu’s AB 1482 — a carefully crafted bill backed by Gov. Gavin Newsom to prevent the kind of outrageous rent gouging that is such a huge contributor to our city’s housing crisis and creates such misery among hundreds of thousands of San Jose residents.
Disappointingly, the editorial recycled many of the flawed arguments that unscrupulous landlords repeat endlessly in their campaigns for constant and unlimited rent hikes.
Building new homes is crucial but will not be enough on its own. An effective response to our housing crisis requires not only production of new homes but preserving existing affordable homes and protecting low-income renters from eviction.
Huge corporate landlords ignore these other two parts of the solution because it would eat into the enormous profits they extract from communities. The Mercury News and East Bay Times have no such excuse.
For protecting low-income tenants from being forced out of their homes and communities, policies that stabilize rent prices have been proven to work. Even the authors of a Stanford study that opposed renter protections in San Francisco conceded that without them virtually all of the protected tenants would have been forced out of the city.
Building new homes creates options for those wealthy enough to afford them, but it does not protect the teachers, nurses, tech service workers and security officers from the type of rent increases that already have forced many of their coworkers’ families from the region.
Building subsidized housing also would help and is part of the solution, but it would take 65,000 subsidized homes across Santa Clara County to prevent the risk of displacement, and the nearly $10 billion this would cost is prohibitive.
When you combine building and subsidizing new homes with measures to preserve affordable homes and protecting existing tenants, we can finally begin to solve the problems that have affected our region so badly.
Families will have the security of knowing that they can stay in their homes and not be forced out at any moment when news of an exorbitant rent hike arrives. This means children can remain in their schools and around their friends, and that health care workers, teachers and other essential workers are not forced to move out of the region.
Major corporate landlords will whine that the benefits for society come at the expense of a fraction of their profits. But bear in mind that a study conducted by the city of San Jose found landlords had taken a 400% return on investment over the last 10 years. These extravagant corporate profits have come at the expense of the hundreds of thousands of families forced to relocate, children forced to move schools, and skyrocketing rates of homelessness.
AB1482 would finally end the practice of constant and unlimited rent hikes from wealthy corporate landlords, stopping unfair evictions, and will play a crucial role in keeping communities together. It deserves widespread support.
Bob Brownstein is the strategic advisor for Working Partnerships USA.
