Many municipalities’ rent control laws — OK, all of them — are somewhat byzantine.
This comes with the territory when governments control something they have no business regulating: prices of goods or services.
They would be no better at trying to establish the market cost of corn flakes than they are at deciding what should be paid for housing. But in the wake of its new voter-approved Measure H rent control scheme, Pasadena City Hall is apparently trying to raise the bar on just how absurd government price fixing can be.
Naturally enough, the renters-written language of the ballot measure, in its attempt to stick it to the man in the face of what are quite clearly skyrocketing rents all over Los Angeles County, put all the costs of paying for a huge new bureaucracy that has been turned into an entire city department onto the city’s landlords, whether big companies or moms and pops with a duplex to rent.
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As Councilman Steve Madison said this week when the City Council met to discuss rent control, “It seems perverse to saddle all the costs of protecting tenants on the small group who were providing rental housing for people.” While acknowledging the obvious for all of Southern California, where demand outstrips supply — “There are tenants that are paying too much of their income on rent” — Madison added: “Property owners have a valid point as well: that it’s very difficult to provide rental housing given the economic constraints.”
There is only one workable solution to the problem of the high cost of rental housing in Pasadena and everywhere else: allowing for the creation of more rental housing. Instead of passing deregulation measures that would do just that, Measure H runs the risk of lessening the supply by driving rental owners from the city. Given the reality of strict new rent controls ruled over not by the elected City Council but by a powerful appointed, well-compensated citizen board, the council this week was able to merely tinker around the edges of Measure H, eliminating provisions that run counter to the state constitution and that would have made it even harder for the poorest Pasadenans to get Section 8 subsidized housing.
The only clarity in this murk: Measure H makes a bad housing situation worse.