By Amir Behboody
I appreciate your articles about the recent developments of the City’s policies with providing affordable housing and our need for apartments. Please also continue writing about the new candidates for City Council.
As a person who believes strongly in “social justice”and helping people in need, I find that rent control accomplishes neither of those worthy objectives. Instead, rent control today subsidizes those lucky few who rented at the right time and does nothing for the neediest who may need to rent now.
I own a four-unit apartment building here in Santa Monica. I am not a greedy, abusive landlord who is not devoted to Santa Monica like the picture that the city’s Rent Control Board and some City Council members paint for all landlords. I struggle with my mortgage payment and work hard to keep up with the demands of maintaining my apartment building. I am truly interested and invested in this city.
Rent control is exacerbating the problems of making available apartments in the city, the high market rental rates, the poor condition of apartment buildings and the friction between the rent control renters and the landlords/market rate renters.
There has never been a test to determine who is benefiting from the below market rate rents. In fact, the individuals still benefiting from rent control just happened to have been in the apartments when the ordinance was founded. I would like to know how many of these people who are abusing the Rent Control Charter Amendment are working in the city rent control department or are city council members. I know of many disreputable situations where rent control tenants (paying a third of the market rental rate) are making more than middle-income wages and have their primary residence outside Santa Monica.
Landlords who request a correction of the rent to an increment closer to market rate (regulation 3304) for their absent tenants can spend years and over $30,000 in legal fees in a frustrating process that favors the tenant. But what is appalling is how the rent control board does not even follow the ordinance for what constitutes “place of usual return” or even respond to the evidence produced.
Please continue your articles revealing the truth and there is hope for us to correct this injustice.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on September 27, 2006. Read the original PDF.