Lauren Justice/AP Images for AIDS Healthcare Foundation
Housing justice advocates from AIDS Healthcare Foundation and its affiliate organizations march in the Kingdom Day Parade in Los Angeles, January 15, 2024.
California is home to some of the country’s most rent-burdened individuals and families. Renters make up about 44 percent of households in the state. The average renter spends over half their income on payments to landlords. That means that 1 in 9 tenants are behind on their monthly payments—most of those people are young adults and people of color.
The ongoing rent crisis has set the stage for the Justice for Renters Act, the third time in six years that housing advocates have attempted to repeal the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, a 1995 law that they argue has stifled local rent control efforts.
The Costa-Hawkins Act prohibits communities from placing rent controls on single-family homes and any housing built after February 1, 1995. It also prevents cities from capping rent increases when a new tenant moves in. The campaign’s supporters argue that these restrictions have exacerbated the state’s affordable-housing crisis, making it difficult for cities to protect tenants from skyrocketing rents.
In recent years, local officials have implemented “just cause” eviction protections that can operate within the confines of Costa-Hawkins.
Yet with most of the state’s renters living in San Francisco and Los Angeles Counties and other expensive, large urban centers, local governments have not been waiting for another repeal campaign to address their housing issues. “We’ve had an unprecedented wave of rent control ordinances passing. Not just in traditionally more progressive places like L.A. or San Francisco, but also in Orange County, Ventura County, and even in the Central Valley,” Shanti Singh, the legislative director for Tenants Together, a San Francisco–based advocacy group, told the Prospect.
For example, in recent years, local officials have implemented “just cause” eviction protections that can operate within the confines of Costa-Hawkins. These protections are designed to prevent arbitrary or retaliatory evictions, ensuring that tenants can only be removed from their homes for legitimate causes. The regulations require landlords to provide a legally valid reason for evicting a tenant, such as nonpayment of rent or violation of lease terms. Oakland passed just cause protections in 2018, and Berkeley followed in 2020.
Along with just cause protections, renters in Los Angeles County’s unincorporated areas and the city of Santa Ana will benefit from recently passed rent control ordinances that limit increases to 3 percent annually or 80 percent of the Consumer Price Index, whichever is lower, on properties that are not covered by Costa-Hawkins.
Michael Lens, a UCLA professor of urban planning and public policy, admits the Costa-Hawkins regulations don’t offer local communities much flexibility. “When it comes to rent control or rent stabilization, they can’t really do much,” he told the Prospect. “There are housing affordability policies that are more effective, like subsidizing tenants directly or funding the production of subsidized housing.”
In the meantime, having already used most of the tools that can operate within the confines of Costa-Hawkins, some communities plan to put new and more aggressive controls before voters later this year. The Bay Area cities of Larkspur, Pittsburg, San Pablo, and Redwood City have introduced their own rent control reforms that would limit annual rent increases and prohibit “renovictions” (evictions for the purpose of renovating a rental space). Voters in the Central Valley city of Delano will weigh in on a measure capping rent increases at 3 percent annually or 60 percent of the CPI on nonexempt properties, along with a stricter eviction process and other tenant protections. Santa Ana will ask voters to reaffirm the city’s existing rent control and just cause eviction laws.
Yet even with this newfound momentum, impact of these measures will likely be modest given Costa-Hawkins limits. Despite local rent control ordinances, over half of renters in the Central Valley, Sierra Nevada, and North California live in single-family properties that are exempt from rent control.
While local initiatives offer some solace, statewide action is still necessary. “Repealing Costa-Hawkins at the state ballot would really broaden the opportunities that these different localities have to expand rent control further, instead of just the arbitrary limits that Costa-Hawkins sets,” Singh says.
The shift in policy across the state, along with growing frustration among Californians regarding housing costs, has produced a political environment that might be more favorable for a repeal this time around. A recent survey by the University of Southern California found that a significant majority of residents believe the state is not doing enough to make housing affordable, and many support stronger rent control: 39 percent of potential voters want to repeal the Costa-Hawkins Act, 41 percent want to keep it, and 20 percent are undecided. This margin is narrower compared to previous elections.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated housing instability in California. As rents surge, more people have lost their homes. Adult children have moved back in with their parents, or never moved out. These new narratives, absent from previous initiatives, may resonate with voters enough to boost the case for stronger statewide cost controls and other tenant protections.
