Second in a series
Re “Mayor Says Culver City Can’t Afford Rent Control for 45 Percent”
[img]2570|exact|Meghan Sahli-Wells. Photo, Todd Johnson.||no_popup[/img]
After landlords and realtors expressed concern during Monday evening’s City Council emotion-jammed meeting that “1970s-era rent control” would be imposed on Culver City, Mayor Meghan Sahli-Wells said she hopes “their fears have been allayed” by the unanimous Council opposition to such a rigid policy.
Tenant fears of wide-open rents, however, burn brightly this morning and for the foreseeable future.
The mayor’s response:
“The problem of affordability is not going away.”
But “I am not advocating for rent control.
Tilting Toward Affordable Housing
“I see affordable housing and rent control as very different things,” she said. “Affordable housing is very important, and I have been actively looking for funding for it. I have had a strong focus on affordable housing.”
Question: Doesn’t rent control animate many more people than affordable housing?
“Depends on where a project is,” Ms. Sahli-Wells said. “When a project is being proposed in a neighborhood, it is on a hot topic.
“On a theoretical level, it doesn’t attract the masses as much as a concrete project does.”
Going into the meeting, the mayor said she was “hoping we would be able to move forward with a healthy community dialogue about ways to protect renters from the most extreme landlord practices, i.e., raising rents 100 percent on long-term renters, elderly and disabled. That is the extremity I would like to stop in Culver City. It is an extremity that happens in Culver City.”
Ms. Sahli-Wells explained she was alluding to “any extreme rate, even 50 percent, with 60 days to comply.”
Onto a wider subject, “I was hoping we would be able to go forward with a robust, sincere community discussion that would have been inclusive of everybody, realtors, apartment owners and, of course, tenants,” the mayor said.
“What happened, though, Monday night was that everybody said ‘It’s rent control,’ ‘it’s rent control,’ ‘it’s rent control.’
“Some tenants said ‘Let’s talk about protections,’ and all landlords said, ‘This is a political third rail. Don’t even go there.’”
A community meeting was tentatively scheduled for a date in the misty future on two subjects, affordable housing and the often remote Landlord Tenant Mediation Board.
(To be continued)
