First of Two Parts
Re “Meghan Looks for Aid in Rounding up Support for Rent Control Chat”
[img]2123|right|Robert Holbrook||no_popup[/img]Dateline Santa Monica – As the longest serving member of the Santa Monica City Council, Bob Holbrook, in his 24th season, speaks with authority and a sense of history, especially when the subject is Santa Monica’s signature legislation, rent control.
“Santa Monica probably had the toughest rent control laws in the nation for many years,” Mr. Holbrook said.
“That is until the state overrode vacancy control. When apartment vacancies developed, it became decontrol. For example, if someone was renting an apartment for $500 a month, they could re-rent it for $1,000 a month if that’s what the market really was.
“The rent will be re-controlled as long as the person lived there. If the person lived there five years, the rent probably would increase $10 to 15 a month every year for those five years – as opposed to going up faster in the regular market place.
“The one thing about Santa Monica,” said Mr. Holbrook, “is that we have lost hundreds, if not thousands, of the original rent-controlled apartments through attrition.
“The attrition rate was about twice as long for the hardline Santa Monica rent control. People literally would improve their lifestyle, get better jobs, finish college, whatever they were doing and keep (the original rent-controlled apartments) as their beach apartments.
Wrong Time to Leave
“They were paying $300, $400 a month, and decided they might as well keep them. They remained on the records for a long time.”
At that point, Mr. Holbrook donned his landlord fedora. “This happened to me, for example,” he said. “A tenant I had moved to Oxnard to be near his mother. But he kept his Santa Monica place for five years. He was down here one weekend a month.”
Even though Santa Monica’s grip on rent control has been loosened in some areas, “here is what is really, really different about Santa Monica,” the Councilman said. “They have an enormously expensive rent control fee. It is roughly $175 per year per unit. This is always rolled into the rentalscape of the apartment. So the tenant winds up paying, virtually, as I understand it, the same kind of rent control as Los Angeles, and theirs is just a tiny fraction of that. So rent control still is big business for Santa Monica.”
(To be continued)
