One woman lost her job and couldn’t pay rent and then found herself in a battle with her landlord, who didn’t believe her story and threatened eviction.
A family financially affected by the Covid-19 pandemic found themselves battling a landlord who raised their rent and threatened to call Immigrations and Customs Enforcement if they fought the increase.
Other tenants live with problems like rats because they don’t want to complain and risk angering their property managers.
These stories were just a few examples of alleged bad behavior by landlords that the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors heard Tuesday before unanimously approving the first reading of a new ordinance that would prohibit retaliatory moves by those who rent out apartments and houses.
The ordinance will be heard a second time on Sept. 20.
The new set of rules comes weeks after a report showing Santa Cruz County as the second most expensive place to rent in the U.S. 81% of very low-income households are paying more than 30% of their income on housing, according to county officials. 92% of extremely low-income households are hit equally as hard.
Zav Hirshfield of Santa Cruz-based Tenant Sanctuary says he speaks to 10-12 renters weekly, many of whom live in fear of standing up for themselves when faced with problems as tenants.
“Fear of retaliation is the dominant reason that people do not assert the rights they have under the law,” Hirshfield said. “Any protection that will make tenants feel that they are safe in asserting their rights and do not have to fear retaliation for just asking that their landlord follow existing law would be an improvement to the lives of renting residents in this county.”
County leaders say the new rules will give renters legal recourse when they are subject to harassment by their landlords or property owners.
The rules still allow landlords to evict problem tenants when done legally.
Among other things, the ordinance would prohibit increasing rent, failing to provide services or repairs, releasing private information about tenants or giving tenants false or misleading information in an attempt to evict them.
Landlords who violate the rules could be forced to pay attorneys’ fees and other costs as ordered by the court.
Board Chair Manu Koenig said the County has been proactive in helping tenants through the Covid-19 pandemic, having distributed more than $26 million countywide in rent relief for residents.
Koenig said the new rules should balance tenants’ rights with those of property owners and landlords—he removed a section of the ordinance that would have made evicting tenants for poor behavior more difficult.
“I recognize that it’s a difficult role to thread the needle between tenants’ rights and landlords’ ability to protect other tenants in the building and do their jobs as good property managers,” he said.
I have been a landlady for 40 years and all of the laws that the county is talking about are already on the books in some way or other. Making it harder to be a housing provider is the opposite of what the county should be doing. I can tell you that I have to make inspections to find the things that need fixing as tenants do not report them. I don’t take any recourse against tenants ever. And I fix what is broken. And I take offense when some person paints a picture of housing providers like we are some evil curse on society. People have no idea the grief that we have to go through and pay for. If people really think that landlords harass tenants for reporting things that need repairing they need to figure out what planet they are on.
It did not pass unanimously on 1st reading. County Counsel said that they needed to bring it back for a new first reading because of the changes. Sept. 20 will be a new first reading of the revised ordinance.
That’s what the Supes voted unanimously for.