Once again, the California Apartment Association has shown that it only cares about guarding Big Real Estate’s outsized profits by delaying a crucial state bill that would have helped millions of tenants struggling through the housing affordability crisis. The CAA, a deep-pocketed front group for many of the nation’s largest corporate landlords, is known for killing state and local tenant protections throughout California.
This week, Assemblymember Ash Kalra withdrew a bill known as AB 1157, which would have strengthened tenant rights in California, including lowering the rent increase cap of the Tenant Protection Act of 2019 and extending tenant protections to all single-family homes. The bill would have shielded millions of tenants from the predatory business practices of corporate landlords, who operate apartment buildings and single-family home rentals all over the state.
Kalra was forced to turn AB 1157 into a two-year bill (meaning the assembly member can bring it back next year) because the California Apartment Association and corporate landlords used their massive influence, bought by shelling out millions in campaign contributions to state politicians, to kill support for the legislation.
Housing Is A Human Right and numerous housing and social justice groups backed AB 1157. Unsurprisingly, anti-tenant organizations California YIMBY and YIMBY Action again sided with the CAA and corporate landlords.
Kalra said in a statement: “I am thankful to our co-authors who stand with me against the corporate landlord lobby and I am appreciative of the hard work of our passionate sponsors and diverse support coalition. As we enter an economic downturn and vulnerable Californians enter more dire financial situations, we must guide our policies with empathy for one another, especially as it pertains to keeping families in their homes.”
He added, “In the fourth largest economy in the world, systemic inequality continues to weigh down millions of Californians. Yet, we must keep up the fight – housing is a human right!”
Soon after Kalra withdrew the bill, the California Apartment Association, which activists have nicknamed the “California Anti-tenant Association,” sent out a press release, spreading lies and misinformation about rent regulations. The CAA made flawed, out-dated arguments that rent control or rent stabilization would harm housing construction in California, and tried, laughably, to come across as if it wants to solve the housing affordability crisis and lower rents.
In reality, corporate landlords, who finance the CAA’s work, have no desire to bring rents down – they want prices to go higher and higher so they can make more and more billions in annual revenue.
In the press release, the CAA also thanked California YIMBY and YIMBY Action for rolling out their own flawed anti-rent control arguments, and bragged that more than 150 landlords went to Sacramento to lobby state politicians. The CAA recently came under fire for hiring fake activists to repeal a rent stabilization ordinance in Concord, California, so it’s possible those 150 people were also fakes.
What is true, however, is that economists and numerous housing experts have said that rent regulations are an urgent tool to protect tenants against predatory landlords while also preserving existing affordable housing and producing new affordable and homeless housing. It’s a comprehensive, multi-pronged strategy for the housing affordability crisis called the “3 Ps.”
In a letter to the Biden administration, top economists also strongly emphasized that the “economics 101 model that predicts rent regulations will have negative effects on the housing sector is being proven wrong by empirical studies that better analyze real world dynamics.” And they noted that “substantial empirical evidence” shows that “rent regulation policies do not limit new construction, nor overall supply of housing.”
And in a white paper published at the Harvard Business Review, experts Brian Callaci and Sandeep Vaheesan wrote, “Recent research shows that the market itself needs to be fixed. Any plan to overhaul the housing market needs to, first, confront the power of landlords to raise rents. Second, it requires rethinking public governance of housing markets behind simplistic prescriptions to just free the housing market from government regulation, assuming lower rents will follow. And third, it needs to provide more muscular government involvement in housing, through price regulation, more robust planning, and even direct public provision.”
The California Apartment Association, California YIMBY, and YIMBY Action, though, keep trotting out the same old, even ridiculous, anti-rent control arguments. Why? They want to maintain the status quo of Big Real Estate charging higher and higher rents, and making bigger and bigger profits, with no regulations to rein them in.
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