5 ms·

If there was no rent control, why didn't he just raise the price up to market value when your lease came up for renewal? I live in a city without rent control,

If there was no rent control, why didn't he just raise the price up to market value when your lease came up for renewal? I live in a city without rent control, and your experience is entirely foreign to me. Heck, my current landlord has offered to pay for things that I don't think are even really his responsibility. He's just happy to have good tenants paying market rate. Switching tenants will probably cost a few thousand dollars in lost rent, and it won't earn him any more income, so he treats us well.

klodolph 6y ago
I don’t know CA, but in NYC, rent controlled apartments can only become market rate apartments in a specific, legally prescribed way. Even if you are in a market rate apartment, the landlord is only allowed to raise your rent by a certain percentage each year; this percentage is higher for market rate and lower for rent-controlled, and there is also a third category called “rent stabilized” which is between market rate and rent controlled. (Just as note about rent control in NYC—rent controlled apartments account for something like 1% of total apartments. The number is slowly going down, it was about 3% twenty years ago.)
latchkey 6y ago
"grandfather clause" The removal of rent control only applied to new tenants. He was limited to a city controlled yearly mandated increase, the entire time I was there. He also couldn't kick me out unless he moved into the apartment himself for some period of time. He also had to put my deposit into an interest bearing account and was required to pay me that interest. The rental increase and payment was a ritual I went through yearly with him and he always delayed giving me the interest as long as he could by law. 2-3x+ more rent is enough reason for a landlord to want to push someone out in a competitive market like Berkeley. There is always a stream of new tenants because it is a college town and limited rental housing is available.
- jtbayly 6y ago
  In other words, it was still rent controlled.
  - filoleg 6y ago
    Yes, but only until the current tenant leaves. Which gave that landlord all the incentives to make the current tenant leave, as evident by the half-assed repairs and other slumlord-like behaviors that the parent comment mentioned.
    - CydeWeys 6y ago
      Yeah, so it actively incentivizes neglecting maintenance duties and driving out the current tenants rather than offering them to renew their lease at the market rate. Sounds like a terrible law.
      - kelnos 6y ago
        That's the downside of rent control. Rent ends up being stable and predictable for tenants, but it reduces the landlord's incentive to fix thing when they break and to make improvements (though many rent control laws, including SF's, still allow landlords to pass some of the cost of capital improvements to renters). Even when rent control continues to be active, landlords have an incentive to want to get their tenants out, because (at least in SF), a new tenant can be charged market rate when they move in (and then that rate is locked in with limited yearly increases until they leave). When rent control in Berkeley ended, but existing tenants grandfathered in, the landlords were incentivized even more than usual to do things to make a tenant want to leave, since then they'd have a completely non-rent-controlled unit again. It's not only bad behavior on the landlords' side. Tenants are incentivized to hold onto the unit as long as possible, even if they want or need to move out for a while. They'll often illegally sublet the place and hope the landlord doesn't come by to check on them until after they move back in. But they're also in some ways trapped: they may want to move, but know that they'll face a huge rent increase in their new place, so they stay put. Honestly I can't really blame landlords or tenants for their bad behavior under rent control; the rules around it only tend to provide one good outcome: rent stable and increases are predictable. Other outcomes are usually negative, and that's an inherent property of the system. But that one good outcome is often good enough to justify keeping rent control around.
chipsa 6y ago
Frequently, even on places that don't have "rent control", there's still limits on how fast landlords can jack up the price on a tenant in the place, but that doesn't apply to new tenants. So if you can only raise the rent by $100/mo once a year, but the market rent for the place is $1000/mo higher than current, you've got 10 years before you actually reach market rate.
e40 6y ago
Because of something called vacancy control. You can't raise rents on people in a unit. You could raise the rent of an empty unit to market rate (in Berkeley, in the 90's after rent control was changed). EDIT: changed word "defeated" to "changed"
- yonran 6y ago
  To add more context, only a few cities (Berkeley, Santa Monica) had strong rent control with vacancy control in the 1980s and 1990s. Other cities, such as San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles, had rent control but have always allowed the rent to reset to market rate when the unit is vacant. The California Law called Costa-Hawkins phased out vacancy control in all cities from 1995 to 1999. After 1999, landlords have the right to set the initial rent, overriding local vacancy controls. (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.xhtml?lawCode=CIV&division=3.&title=5.&part=4.&chapter=2.7.&article= https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.x...) In Nov 2018, California voters rejected Proposition 10 41%-59%, which would have repealed Costa-Hawkins and allowed vacancy controls again (https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_10,_Local_Rent_Control_Initiative_%282018%29 https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_10,_Local_Ren...). Berkeley, Richmond, and Santa Monica would immediately have imposed vacancy controls under their existing laws. In Nov 2020, California voters again rejected Proposition 21 40%-60%, which would have allowed vacancy controls that limit rent increases to 15% per vacancy (https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_21,_Local_Rent_Control_Initiative_%282020%29 https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_21,_Local_Ren...).

klodolph 6y ago

I don’t know CA, but in NYC, rent controlled apartments can only become market rate apartments in a specific, legally prescribed way. Even if you are in a market rate apartment, the landlord is only allowed to raise your rent by a certain percentage each year; this percentage is higher for market rate and lower for rent-controlled, and there is also a third category called “rent stabilized” which is between market rate and rent controlled. (Just as note about rent control in NYC—rent controlled apartments account for something like 1% of total apartments. The number is slowly going down, it was about 3% twenty years ago.)

latchkey 6y ago

"grandfather clause" The removal of rent control only applied to new tenants. He was limited to a city controlled yearly mandated increase, the entire time I was there. He also couldn't kick me out unless he moved into the apartment himself for some period of time. He also had to put my deposit into an interest bearing account and was required to pay me that interest. The rental increase and payment was a ritual I went through yearly with him and he always delayed giving me the interest as long as he could by law. 2-3x+ more rent is enough reason for a landlord to want to push someone out in a competitive market like Berkeley. There is always a stream of new tenants because it is a college town and limited rental housing is available.

jtbayly 6y ago
In other words, it was still rent controlled.
- filoleg 6y ago
  Yes, but only until the current tenant leaves. Which gave that landlord all the incentives to make the current tenant leave, as evident by the half-assed repairs and other slumlord-like behaviors that the parent comment mentioned.
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    Yeah, so it actively incentivizes neglecting maintenance duties and driving out the current tenants rather than offering them to renew their lease at the market rate. Sounds like a terrible law.
    - kelnos 6y ago
      That's the downside of rent control. Rent ends up being stable and predictable for tenants, but it reduces the landlord's incentive to fix thing when they break and to make improvements (though many rent control laws, including SF's, still allow landlords to pass some of the cost of capital improvements to renters). Even when rent control continues to be active, landlords have an incentive to want to get their tenants out, because (at least in SF), a new tenant can be charged market rate when they move in (and then that rate is locked in with limited yearly increases until they leave). When rent control in Berkeley ended, but existing tenants grandfathered in, the landlords were incentivized even more than usual to do things to make a tenant want to leave, since then they'd have a completely non-rent-controlled unit again. It's not only bad behavior on the landlords' side. Tenants are incentivized to hold onto the unit as long as possible, even if they want or need to move out for a while. They'll often illegally sublet the place and hope the landlord doesn't come by to check on them until after they move back in. But they're also in some ways trapped: they may want to move, but know that they'll face a huge rent increase in their new place, so they stay put. Honestly I can't really blame landlords or tenants for their bad behavior under rent control; the rules around it only tend to provide one good outcome: rent stable and increases are predictable. Other outcomes are usually negative, and that's an inherent property of the system. But that one good outcome is often good enough to justify keeping rent control around.

chipsa 6y ago

Frequently, even on places that don't have "rent control", there's still limits on how fast landlords can jack up the price on a tenant in the place, but that doesn't apply to new tenants. So if you can only raise the rent by $100/mo once a year, but the market rent for the place is $1000/mo higher than current, you've got 10 years before you actually reach market rate.

e40 6y ago

Because of something called vacancy control. You can't raise rents on people in a unit. You could raise the rent of an empty unit to market rate (in Berkeley, in the 90's after rent control was changed). EDIT: changed word "defeated" to "changed"

yonran 6y ago
To add more context, only a few cities (Berkeley, Santa Monica) had strong rent control with vacancy control in the 1980s and 1990s. Other cities, such as San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles, had rent control but have always allowed the rent to reset to market rate when the unit is vacant. The California Law called Costa-Hawkins phased out vacancy control in all cities from 1995 to 1999. After 1999, landlords have the right to set the initial rent, overriding local vacancy controls. (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.xhtml?lawCode=CIV&division=3.&title=5.&part=4.&chapter=2.7.&article= https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.x...) In Nov 2018, California voters rejected Proposition 10 41%-59%, which would have repealed Costa-Hawkins and allowed vacancy controls again (https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_10,_Local_Rent_Control_Initiative_%282018%29 https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_10,_Local_Ren...). Berkeley, Richmond, and Santa Monica would immediately have imposed vacancy controls under their existing laws. In Nov 2020, California voters again rejected Proposition 21 40%-60%, which would have allowed vacancy controls that limit rent increases to 15% per vacancy (https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_21,_Local_Rent_Control_Initiative_%282020%29 https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_21,_Local_Ren...).