Rent control repeal in works: Half Moon Bay also votes to remove the city’s rental registry program

The city’s rent control ordinance currently sets a maximum annual rent adjustment to the lesser of 3% or an 80% cap in changes to the consumer price index, which continually adjusts and is linked to the price of common goods. It applies to multiunit properties built before Feb. 1, 1995, with a $286 per year fee for each unit. 

The rental registry program, designed in tandem with the ordinance, requires landlords to identify units they own in Half Moon Bay so the city could better understand its rental market. 

The three councilmembers who voted to end the programs cited an outsized impact on mom-and-pop landlords in the city, and voiced prior concerns that rent control wasn’t the right fit for a city of Half Moon Bay’s size. 

“I don’t want to push small local landholdings into institutional investors and private equity. I don’t want to push people out of the rental market into big, investor-owned housing situations,” Mayor Debbie Ruddock said. “We have a small coastal community here with a lot of small landlords, and that’s what we should try and maintain.” 

Ruddock said she would have been in favor of keeping the rental registry for data collection purposes if there was a way to make the program more voluntary and less punitive, but backed down from that approach after City Manager Matthew Chidester said it would likely be impossible. 

Ruddock and councilmembers Paul Nagengast and Patric Bo Jonsson, who also voted to repeal the ordinances, maintained they were in favor of exploring greater tenant protections and assistance offerings. 

But those arguments fell far short for Vice Mayor Deborah Penrose and Councilmember Robert Brownstone, both of whom put out impassioned pleas for the vulnerable community members they said would be most hurt by repealing rent control. 

Farmworkers in the area are making average salaries of $20,000 to $30,000 a year and first-year teachers are making no more than $65,000 a year, Penrose said. 

“None of these people can afford to live here — none of them. They’re all suffering,” she said. “What do we do? What do we do as a council? We say, ‘Oh gee, we don’t want to hurt the landlords, we really don’t want to hurt the landlords.’” 

Expanding legal and tenant protections will be moot if those same tenants are simply unable to afford rent and have to move away, Penrose said, and rental assistance programs on the coastside are already extremely overburdened and able to offer one month’s relief at most. 

While state law technically limits rent increases to 5% plus CPI, that program is enforced only if tenants sue their landlords, a prospect that would be highly unlikely for anyone already struggling to pay rent, Brownstone said. 

“Basically, now we’re just saying anything goes in terms of rent increases, because [Assembly Bill 1482] is realistically unenforceable in terms of who has the resources,” he said. “Just realize that’s the consequences of what you’re suggesting here.” 

Brownstone originally said he would have been in favor of aligning the city’s rent control with state rental caps, thereby giving landlords more leniency on rent increases while still providing local enforcement. That option did not gain traction with the other councilmembers. 

Realtor groups and property owners have been actively advocating against the city’s rent control ordinance since its inception, and some were in the audience during the council’s deliberation to continue to make their case against it. 

“Housing providers are hurting, and they’re running out of time to save their property,” real estate broker Robert Pedro said. 

Tenants, too, were in the audience to share with the council that they were hurting. Resident Carolina Carbajal urged councilmembers to remember why the ordinance was originally passed.

“We suffer a lot of being evicted and our rights are violated many times,” she said through a translator. “The rents are increasing disproportionately and that is what most of you saw, and that’s why you voted in favor.”