Check out the presentation on repealing Costa Hawkins we made at the August YIMBY Action monthly meeting here.

1. Rent control is an immediate anti-displacement tool
   1. We all know our housing crisis is fundamentally about low supply, but it will take decades for the state to get its act together and build enough housing to make a real difference.
   2. Tenants don’t have these decades to wait. Neighborhoods like the Mission will be completely changed in the time it takes us to address this — and that’s a neighborhood with rent control on many of its buildings. Others in the state stand little chance.
   3. Rent control can help. At its core, we’re talking about the rights of long-term tenants to have stability in their homes and remain in the places they themselves helped create. Diverse neighborhoods will be the most threatened by this lack of stability, and without rent control we’ll see places completely whitewashed.
2. Rent control has never applied to new construction
   1. Most of the worry about rent control affecting housing supply is that it wouldn’t guarantee developers adequate return and so they’d abandon units or switch to condos.
   2. But rent control in California and in the United States has never applied to new construction, not once, anywhere.
   3. The likely outcome is a rolling date so that rent control would come in after e.g. 15 years, allowing the developer the incentive needed to build his building and increasing the supply of affordable housing.
3. Repealing Costa-Hawkins puts renters and landlords on the same page
   1. Prop. 13 is a price control for homeowners, benefiting the very people who are the most stable and profit the most from the housing crisis.
   2. Repealing Costa-Hawkins evens out the playing field for those most vulnerable (renters).
4. Costa Hawkins is arbitrary
   1. Costa Hawkins arbitrarily sets the rent control date at 1995, which over time promises to reduce our total number of rent-controlled units.
   2. It also punishes those cities that enacted rent control earlier, the same cities that are most struggling with housing costs today.
   3. Repealing it just makes sure that we either come up with a state solution down the line or cities that are most struggling take it upon themselves to pass rent control.
5. This will not lead to an explosion of rent control
   1. Most cities have the ability to pass updated rent control laws now, but don’t; only 12 cities have rent control in California, and several have recently defeated measures to pass it.
   2. This will likely only really affect big cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles.
6. Rent control is not universally rejected by economists
   1. Most people point to an op-ed by Paul Krugman that cites a 1992 survey of American economists, 93% of whom said they were against rent ceilings. (Seriously, almost everyone cites this survey when saying that economists are in total agreement about rent control.)
   2. The 1993 survey talks about “a ceiling on rents” — hard caps on the rent for a unit — and they say that reduces housing supply. There is no such thing in California as a rent ceiling.
   3. The rent control we’re talking about goes up with inflation, guarantees a return for the landlord, and has never been applied to new construction.
7. The Stanford study does not find that rent control worsened the housing crisis
   1. The Stanford study only finds that the benefits to renters protected by rent-control almost exactly matched the losses due to lower supply and thus higher overall rents (p.26 & 29-30).
   2. The most you can say about this is that rent control helped long-term tenants at the expense of new tenants, which in the context of San Francisco mostly means helping the poor and costing the rich. This is a big generalization, but the truth is that overall, lower-income households have left as higher-income ones have come in.
   3. Even this you can’t really say, though, because the reason cited for the lower overall rental supply is that there was an incentive to convert housing to condos. The city could have ameliorated this by preventing condo conversions of rent-controlled housing, eliminating much of the costs associated with lower rental supply.
8. This would politically be a huge win for YIMBY
   1. We need to think about what YIMBY becomes going forward. In the beginning, it was enough to call attention to the lack of supply throughout the city and state; we’ll keep doing this all the time.
   2. But as a tenants groups, it’s important that we actually show up for existing tenants who need relief. This is not about pleasing tenants rights groups; that’ll never happen. This is about not constantly being on the side of real estate interests and taking a principled stand that we support the right of tenants to stay in place.
   3. Supporting this would win us favor all over the state in the right places, with the people who are hurting most in this crisis. If we’re really concerned about justice and fairness for tenants in California, we have to be on their side and support this.
9. Compared to literally anything else that affects housing supply, this is minor
   1. There are a thousand things that heavily impact housing supply — zoning, permitting, construction costs, etc. All of those things are worth fighting against.
   2. Rent control is the only one that, if it were to significantly affect housing supply, would also immediately help tenants stay in place. It would be a small impact on the cost of housing compared to any other restriction, and it would do a lot of good.
10. Repealing Costa-Hawkins is not a distraction from the real issues
    1. There’s worry that repealing this will mean all the attention is sucked out of housing supply and into rent control fights in different cities for the next few years.
    2. The people fighting for rent control in different cities are not the same ones who would fight for more housing supply anyways. This will not take anyone’s attention away from housing supply, because we’re talking about two different groups of activists.
    3. If anything, this will give supply-side arguments more power to say “we did rent control, now we have to do all the other stuff like build more housing.”