For fair rent

An Open Letter to the Healdsburg City Council Regarding the Current Rent Crisis:
As several recent articles and numerous letters in the Tribune have made clear, there is a serious crisis in Healdsburg as a result of dramatically rising rents and sudden evictions. Many Healdsburgers are losing their homes.
Overflow crowds have come to recent city hall meetings. Almost all have demanded action to preserve the homes of low income residents. About 100 of those who spoke out have joined together to form Healdsburg Fair Rent, to work for solutions.
We are supporting other individuals and groups, such as North County Community Services, who are working on the short-term project of helping those who have already lost or are currently losing their homes. We also support those who are working on the longer-term project of finding ways to cause more low income housing to be built. However, we see that it is possible that in the near future more already existing low income housing will be lost than is likely to be built for a good number of years. If we don’t preserve the low income housing we already have, we may never catch up. Accordingly, the main project of Healdsburg Fair Rent is to look for ways to prevent rents from being raised excessively and to prevent tenants from being evicted without just cause.
We are pleased that city council members have recently made strong statements saying this is a serious crisis and that they intend to take action to resolve the problem. As mayor McCaffery said at the Aug. 3 council meeting, the message from the city to the rental owners is, “…either you’re going to do something about it, or the council is going to do something about it and is going tie your hands.” According to the city, the strong consensus among rental owners and their representatives is that they agree with the city’s goals, so the city is first trying a voluntary measure, the Rent Stabilization Advisory (published in the Tribune Aug. 27.) We see the city’s Rent Stabilization Advisory program as a good faith effort on the part of our city government and a potentially very useful first step. Our group wants to ensure that the advisory program is indeed useful, and that if it proves inadequate to the task, our city government will be ready to move forward promptly to enact measures that will be adequate.
For starters, the city needs to fully implement the program of bringing the rest of the city’s landlords into agreement with the advisory. The city manager reported on Aug. 3 that he’d gotten agreements from rental property owners and managers representing about 650 of the city’s 1,857 rental units (35 percent). These were listed on a document distributed at the meeting. So far, so good. In the notice from the city in the Tribune on Aug. 27, we see several more parties have been added to the list, so there seems to be progress in getting the other rental owners into agreement. Unfortunately, one manager, representing about 100 units, has been removed. So we don’t know if there is any actual forward movement. The city needs to continue to pursue these agreements and to keep us all posted on which owners are and are not in agreement, and what percentage has been achieved.
The city needs to fully implement a transparent program to inform tenants. The city should let us all know how tenants will be aware of what the rental owners have agreed to and how they can get help from the city if the agreements are not adhered to.
The city needs to establish a transparent procedure to monitor, and let all residents know, whether the advisory is actually working. So far, it is not clear that the advisory is working adequately. In the case of a number of units, we know that the tenants had been told that their rents would be rising from 50 to 65 percent in two stages, starting in September. Then the city decided to act and asked for adherence to an agreement allowing a maximum 10 percent increase. Then the tenants learned that the rent increases would go ahead, in spite of the agreement. As it stands, unless the city can get the overwhelming majority of rental owners to agree to the advisory, and unless it develops some method to better keep the rental owners in agreement, then it will be time to move forward to a binding mechanism.
The city needs to correct the maximum percent increase allowed over the long term. As stated the advisory allows a 10 percent increase, every year, forever. Considering that the average annual CPI over the last decade has been under two percent, and that wages for most workers have increased less if at all, 10 percent is wildly high. Look at it another way: if you rented all your life, paying the median California rental rate when you were 20 in 1965, and your rent had increased 10 percent each year … today, at 70 years old, you’d be paying nearly $12,000 a month.
Finally, while the city is developing its advisory program, and considering that the program has certainly not yet yielded the success that the city had hoped for, we request that the city institute a rent increase moratorium. There is nothing to prevent a moratorium from being in place while the advisory program is being set up, and we’ve already seen that just relying on the incipient advisory has not been adequate.
Robert Nuese is a member of “Healdsburg Fair Rent.”