By Jeffrey A. Sklar Santa Monica Rent Control Board Commissioner
Proposition 98’s defeat underscores the fact that Californians will not be fooled again. A majority see rent control as a good thing for everyone. Enhancing the Rousseauistic “common good.” They see that rent control jurisdiction landlords are not forced to be the rental housing business, that they are assured a fair return on their investment under the Berkenfeld case, and most importantly, that the general good is served by rent control.
It tends to promote stable neighborhoods, where neighbors likely know each others’ names — a vanishing element in modern city life. Rent control can help create more economically diverse classrooms, where children from different socio-economic backgrounds may spend years, K-12, attending classes together.
I would not be surprised to find that rent control has also been shown to have a dramatic effect on reducing crime. Because people tend to stay in the same place for a long period of time under rent control, perhaps crime is deterred because criminals who might otherwise come into buildings without causing suspicion know they might get caught in Santa Monica. Hence, rent control can be said to help create safer neighborhoods.
These are just a few of the tradeoffs when a city regulates local residential apartment business, and mobile-home park, profit potential.
Profits from utility companies are regulated, profits of cable and phone companies are regulated, hospitals are regulated, crops are subsidized, in all of these things, profit is limited under a concern for the common good.
Yet many people, shareholders, officers and directors of large public corporations, and trust fund babies — many of whom have only fractional interests in businesses and trusts that operate in the residential housing and mobile home businesses — sound a specious cacophony of infringed constitutional rights, constitutional rights that were in fact never intended for artificial entities such as corporations, LLC’s, and family trusts.
Rent control serves the very rights that this country was created upon, the inherent dignity of each of us, as individuals, and not as subjects to a higher breed. Individual liberty, not unlimited exploitation of property at the expense of a stable life for tenants, is the founding principle of this once great nation. Individual liberty and rent control serve the same purpose, the reaffirmation of individual dignity.
We are, as a nation, I believe, suffering the effects of unbridled greed that has outpaced good sense and social responsibility. I am excited that the trend may be reversing, the tide shifting.
The youth get it. Thank you California for the defeat of 98. And best of luck to you, Mr. Obama. I have been in public office for the last eight years, termed out like Mr. Bush.
He and I have served at the same time, at hugely different levels, and to very different purposes. Its been a long and strange trip indeed.
I hope I have left a better legacy than he has, but that’s not saying much, is it.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 2, 2008. Read the original PDF.