Renters getting best of the deal
CITYWIDE With Spanish-style wall tiling, hardwood floors, crown molding and a hand-picked soft yellow paint job, Jennifer Lane just loves her spacious one-bedroom apartment, for which she pays $1,320 a month.
Just two years ago,a close friend moved out of a two-bedroom apartment just a few doors down after graduating from UCLA. Having grown up in the North of Wilshire apartment, Lane’s friend left the building after two decades, having paid about $600 month.
Down the courtyard lives a long-time tenant who has resided in the complex for close to four decades. Lane, a public relations consultant, speculates her neighbor pays considerably less than $600 per month.
It’s the scenario of dichotomous living repeated in rental unit buildings across the city, where a new tenant paying $1,300 a month for a one-bedroom can look out their windows and find an entrenched neighbor paying half the price for double the space.
In Santa Monica, renowned for its strict rent control policies, more than 52 percent of rental residents have lived in their current units since 1998 — the year before vacancy decontrol allowed landlords to set the initial rent for each new tenant at market rate.
The Rent Control Board funded a tenant survey study last year that found approximately 59 percent of residents who have lived in their rental unit since before vacancy decontrol have actually lived in their units for more than 15 years.
The mean rent for residents who have lived in their respective buildings for more than eight years is $860 a month, while those who moved in after 1999 are paying, on average, $1,405 in rent. More than half of the renters who have lived in the same unit for more than eight years are between the ages of 45 and 65, while the majority of renters who moved in after 1999 are between 18 and 44 years old.
“I can’t help but be envious,” Lane said, alluding to her fellow tenants who pay considerably less rent for a larger unit. “It’s the luck of the draw. I wish I was in their shoes.”
Rent control was adopted by voters in April 1979 in response to the shortage of housing and rising rents.
“Long-time renters have had protection against exorbitant rent increases and condo conversions and unfair evictions,” said Denny Zane, the president of Santa Monicans for Renters Rights (SMRR), a local political organization that was instrumental in passing the rent control ordinance.
The implementation of the Ellis Act, enacted in 1986, which allows landlords to remove their units from the rental market and evict tenants, and vacancy decontrol has weakened rent control protections for tenants.
Before Zane purchased a house 10 years ago, he lived in a two-bedroom apartment for 17 years, paying a little more than $1,000 a month by the time he moved out. The rent started at $450 a month when Zane moved into the building at Ninth Street and Idaho Avenue.
“My $450 a month in 1980 was probably average for a two-bedroom at that time under rent control,” Zane said. “It certainly wasn’t a fancy place.”
Vacancy decontrol has changed the demographics and culture of the neighborhood, allowing for higher rents and attracting higher-end stores and restaurants in the process, Zane said.
Santa Monica today would be much like the Santa Monica of 1979 if vacancy decontrol had not been implemented, he added.
Bruce Ozga, who lives across from Lane in the same building,moved to his one-bedroom unit three years ago, paying about $1,200 a month. Before moving out of California a few years ago, he lived in a rent control apartment just down the street, for which he paid about $600 a month for a one-bedroom.
One of the main reasons rent control was originally implemented was to protect the elderly and those on fixed incomes from rapidly rising rent, Ozga said.
“Clearly, it’s not only for the elderly,” Ozga said.
In a city where affordable housing is hard to come by, rent control might not be helping the cause.
Joseph Fitzsimons, the vice president of Sullivan-Dituri, a real estate brokerage and management firm in Santa Monica, believes rent control has made the city unattractive for new development. On top of that, the city also has restrictive zoning and other requirements, making it difficult to build housing.
In West Los Angeles, it takes developers about a year to go from demolition to the certificate of occupancy, Fitzsimons estimated. In Santa Monica, developers could wait up to three years before they can even break ground.
“It’s all designed to slow down new construction,” he said.
Sullivan-Dituri manages more than 1,200 units in Santa Monica, and more than half of the tenants pay market rate, Fitzsimons estimated.
There would not be such a housing crisis in Santa Monica if it weren’t for rent control, said Carl Lambert, the president of the Action Apartment Association in Santa Monica, an organization representing the city’s landlords.
In the absence of the rent control ordinance, rent would be lower and more housing would be available, Lambert said. The ordinance makes it more difficult to knock down a three-and four-unit building in favor of a larger 10-unit building.
But the ordinance could be seen as an advantage to owners if it causes a housing shortage that can’t meet demand — rent can go up for vacant apartments.
One of the biggest drawbacks of rent control is the long-term tenants who believe they are “eviction proof,” Lambert said.
“They can be free to be as obnoxious and awful to other tenants without fear of reprisal,” he said.
The owner of an apartment building for six years, Lambert said he often fields complaints about his rent control tenants from his market rate tenants.
There could be some animosity among the market and non-market rate paying tenants as the former might feel they are subsidizing the latter’s rent. Landlords, such as Lambert, raise the rent on vacant units to make up for the losses in the rent control units.
“There are myths that landlords are always thinking about the money and I can tell you that landlords are people-people because they are willing to deal with tenants and people and solve problems,”Lambert said.
The Rent Control Board office at the city of Santa Monica receives occasional complaints from tenants about owners who refuse to make repairs because they are a long-term tenant. Some cases are referred to the City Attorney’s Consumer Protection Unit as harassment claims.
The office also receives complaints from long-term tenants who claim their landlord offered financial incentive for them to vacate the apartment.
“We have tenants saying owners say that they should just leave,” said Tracy Condon, the manager of the public information department for the Rent Control Board. “Certainly, it’s not every landlord in the city, just a small percentage.”
“With the prospect of market rate rent, some owners do try to encourage some tenants to leave,” she added.
For Marian Blount, her experiences living in a one-bedroom apartment for five and a half years — 15 years in the same building — have been nothing but positive, as she had a solid relationship with her landlord, who passed away last year.
Blount, an executive assistant at the American Red Cross in Santa Monica, moved into a two-bedroom apartment in Ocean Park 15 years ago, paying $850 a month. Five years ago, she decided to scale down and moved into a one-bedroom unit in the same building and pays about $720 a month. It’s just Blount and her two cats sharing the unit.
The former landlord always had positive relationships with all of its tenants, always trying to keep the rent from rising too high, Blount said. Now that he has passed away, the ownership of the building has fallen into the hands of his relatives, who promised last year that they would not sell the building for at least a couple of years.
The charming one-bedroom apartment is located in a four-unit building. There is no bad blood among the tenants, said Blount, who is now looking into moving to senior housing.
If it wasn’t for rent control, Blount said she could never have afforded to live in Santa Monica.
Some landlords have become greedy with rent, Blount said, recalling a landlord on her block six years ago charging $1,800 for a one-bedroom.
“I think it’s fine,”Blount said of rent control. “If it really was that big of an infringement on landlords, I’m not sure they would own the buildings.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on May 19, 2007. Read the original PDF.