PHOTO/SANDY PERRY
SAN JOSE, CA — Renters in San Jose continue to live under enormous pressures from egregious rents and a lack of enforcement around tenant concerns with unsafe living environments. Landlords face no accountability for their inability to keep units up to standards and tenants feeling secure.
Just shy of a year of organizing to increase tenant protections in the city by dramatically strengthening the city’s Apartment Rent Ordinance (ARO) and enacting just cause eviction protections throughout the city, an analysis of San Jose’s Apartment Rent Ordinance has been released by the Economic Roundtable. It was contracted by the city’s Housing Department.
The preliminary report found that median rent increases for units under the rent control ordinance have exceeded those for non-ARO units; median rents for ARO housing units rose 21% percent between 1990-2014 while non-ARO units rose at 13% during the same period. The allowable rent increases under the ARO (at 8%) are above the annual rate of increase in market rates in the whole Bay Area, which has been an average of 4.7% since 1980. “As a result, the ARO has had little if any impact on overall rents,” states the report.
The report confirms what tenants and advocates have been expressing all along. Being a landlord of an ARO apartment is very profitable. The study also shows that tenants in ARO apartments have a lower-income, are overburdened with rent, and live in overcrowded units. The existing ordinance has not helped keep rents low and keep families in their homes.
Jose P. has lived in a rent controlled 3-bedroom apartment for 14 years in San Jose’s District 1, seeing his rent increase from $1,600 to $2, 600 this year. He’s had to rent out the other rooms in his apartment, even converting the living room into a bedroom to make enough money for the rent.
The current landlord only contacts tenants to collect rent when its a few days late and to personally inform tenants of rent increases without warning. He will go door to door to inform the tenants that the following month rents will be increased, and that if they cannot afford it they can move out. Some folks in the complex have made the decision to leave after outrageous rent increases. Jose says that’s nearly impossible as a single father of 3 kids. “Who’s going to rent to me?” he asks.
“We pay 10 sometimes 11%, this time I paid 3% more over the limit. Who care[s] about it?” he asks. “Only myself, so I have to pay whatever the landlord wants.”
Jose has shared his story with not only Mayor Liccardo, but with his councilmember Chappie Jones. “They are not living the way that we are living; they don’t pay the rent that we’ve been paying or make the salaries we make. So they don’t really care if we survive or not,” he said.
Jose lives next to a similar ARO complex with another owner where the rent is $1,600. “There is no rent control,” Jose adds.
