The fight over rent control in Silicon Valley is picking up steam.
The Mountain View Tenants' Coalition filed an initiative this afternoon named The Community Stabilization and Fair Rent Charter Amendment. This comes in the midst of a fierce rent control debate in San Jose and just one day after a Burlingame organization said it would file an initiative to overturn the city's anti-rent control law.
The Mountain View initiative would allow annual rent increases to between 2 and 5 percent, with the exact rate tied to changes to the Bay Area Consumer Price Index, a measure of inflation. The initiative also calls for a just cause ordinance, which would require landlords to have specific reasons, such as non-payment or lease violations, to evict tenants.
The city has until April 16 to prepare an official ballot title and summary of the measure. Depending on when this occurs, tenant advocates will need to gather around 4,500 votes by late mid- to late June in order to ensure the measure will appear on the November ballot.
Since last summer, Mountain View tenants have packed multiple city council meetings sharing stories about rent hikes and displacement, and pressuring councilmembers to implement rent stabilization measures.
In December, the council increased funding for a rent relief program and approved a "right to lease" ordinance that requires landlords to offer tenants a lease no shorter than six months.
But on March 15, in the face of heavy opposition by local landlords, Mountain View's city council rejected a proposal that would require binding arbitration to settle disputes over rent increases.
"Call it binding arbitration; call it rent control; call it rent stabilization - it's picking an arbitrary number without basis and deciding that's the amount that rents can increase in a year," Jessica Epstein, government affairs director with the Silicon Valley Association of Realtors, told the Mountain View Voice.
Tenants' Coalition volunteer Evan Ortiz said that meeting was the tipping point for the organization.
"Once we saw we weren't getting a reprieve from city council, we directed our energies to ... the charter amendments," he said.
Ortiz, who works at Google, has rented in Mountain View since 2011. He said the Tenants' Coalition came together last summer in response to a rise in evictions and what he called "egregious" rent increases.
He started with the group as a translator for Spanish-speaking tenants and got more involved as a result of his interaction with struggling renters.
"I just saw that the pain and suffering was so much more than I possibly could have imagined," Ortiz said.
Source: The Silicon Valley Business Journal, Bryce Druzin
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2016/04/01/mountain-view-rent-control-fight-headed-for-ballot.html
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