Title
Recommendation to Accept the Annual Report for the Rent Program, Direct Staff to Prepare Certain Amendments to the Rent Review, Rent Stabilization, and Limitations on Evictions Ordinance, Consider Revisions to Ordinance No. 3132 Governing the Rent Review Advisory Committee, and Authorize Staff to Prepare an Updated Fee Study to Pay for Implementing the Ordinance. (Rent Stabilization 265)
Body
To: Honorable Mayor and Members of the City Council
From: Jill Keimach, City Manager
Re: Recommendation to Accept the Annual Report for the Rent Program, Direct Staff to Prepare Certain Amendments to the Rent Review, Rent Stabilization, and Limitations on Evictions Ordinance, Consider Revisions to Ordinance No. 3132 Governing the Rent Review Advisory Committee and Authorize Staff to Prepare an Updated Fee Study to Pay for Implementing the Ordinance
BACKGROUND
In late 2014, a group of residents requested the City Council do more to protect renters who were being impacted by rapidly rising rents, notices to vacate for no cause, and low vacancy rates. To better understand what was happening in the local rental market, the City undertook a study to analyze the rental market and the demographics of the renter community. The study, along with a range of options for providing additional tenant protections, was presented to the City Council at its November 4, 2015 meeting.
Based on the rent study and the complexity of the issues involved in stabilizing rents and addressing no cause and no fault evictions, the City Council adopted an urgency ordinance that imposed a moratorium on residential rent increases at or above 8% for multi-family rental units built prior to February 1, 1995, and on evictions from all residential rental units except for "just cause". That moratorium was thereafter extended until the Rent Review, Rent Stabilization and Limitations on Evictions Ordinance (Ordinance No. 3148 "the Ordinance") became effective on March 31, 2016.
The Ordinance prov...
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