Rent roh

Two bits of news from outside Alameda, but definitely affects Alamedans.  If you are a member of the Alameda renters Coalition Facebook page there is tale after take of rent hikes and 60-day notices.  The first is from a city north of Alameda, from Santa Rosa which recently attempted to stem the tide through a form of rent control.  The proposals were defeated by a vote of 4 to 3.  From the Santa Rose Press Democrat:

But it rejected, also on a 4-3 vote, a proposal to temporarily bar landlords from increasing rents by more than 3 percent per year while the City Council discusses the larger issues of affordable housing at future meetings.

The close votes mirrored a deep division in the community about whether the city should address the issue through more regulation or less.

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Regarding the moratorium, Combs stressed that she was only proposing the ideas to protect renters from landlords seeking to impose sharp hikes before rent control could be implemented. But a majority of council members felt that talking about rent control would spook landlords, exacerbating the very problem the council was trying to solve.

And from Berlin (Germany):

Barely a month after the German capital introduced a new set of rules that limits rent increases within a given area, figures collected by ImmobilienScout24 show that the average cost of new Berlin rental contracts has dropped 3.1 percent within a month.

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The new law introduced on June 1st—called the mietpreisbremse or “rental price brake” in German—works like this. An overseeing body fixes a standard median rent per square meter for each city district, using figures based a biennial state census of rents. No new rental contract within the district is then permitted to charge over 10 percent more than this amount. This still means that price increases for new rentals are possible, but if they come, they happen far more slowly.

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concerns that rent control will cause the supply of apartments to dry up have been partly appeased by a city-wide building program that should deliver 30,000 new rental apartments over the next decade.

And from another blog, this description of San Francisco could readily apply to Alameda:

The bureaucracy is unrelenting and the voting public hates new construction while it simultaneously demands more affordable housing. That combination doesn’t add up. And you can grow old and die waiting for affordable subsidized housing to be built.