Third in a series
Re “Why Rent Control Is a Negative for One Councilman”
[img]1305|right|Andy Weissman||no_popup[/img]City Councilman Andy Weissman is comfortable with his firm opposition to the rent control concept, surrounded as he is by a majority of California communities.
“Many cities do not believe that rent control solves a problem,” he said.
“Depending on how the regulation is written, it discourages property owners from upgrading buildings.
“In some instances, you are able to get a special bonus rent increase for capital investments. But it is recoupable over time.
“Lay out $100,000 to better your building today, and if you are only allowed to recoup that at a rate of 3 percent, 4 percent, 5 percent a year per tenant, a lot of apartment buildings) will continue to be rundown,” Mr. Weissman told the newspaper.
“I don’t know how many rental units are in Culver City, the nature of the ownership or how many have been held in families for lengthy periods of time.
“If you are going to enact rent control, you will make it difficult for people who are inclined to want to sell their buildings because their parents bought them back in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Kids are now the owners, and they don’t want to be landlords. They want to sell.
A Culver City Scenario
“This,” said Mr. Weissman, “is exactly what happened in the two buildings that keep getting talked about.”
To repeat, “what happened in the two buildings that keep getting talked about”:
One sudden death occurred in each of those buildings – a 40-year-old man and a 52-year-old woman – weeks after they were told their rents would virtually be doubled, effective now.
“Those two buildings,” Mr. Weissman said, “had been owned for many years. Ownership, for whatever reason, didn’t provide for market rents when they could have, arguably should have. But that is a different issue.
“So the buildings get sold and you have a landlord with a mortgage on a building that perhaps never had one because it was paid off many years ago. Now you have a mortgage burden every month. You have to be able to cover that by rent.
“This gets back to the fact that rent control is not good policy.”
The Councilman appeared apologetic for having gone fishing in a philosophical pond. “Talking about rent control only becomes nuts-and-bolts,” Mr. Weissman said, “when you get to particular aspects of a regulation. You could have a rule that says of you are going to increase rent by more than x-percentage, it must be phased in over three or four or six months. That would provide some breathing space for people who want to move or have to move, and there is a major distinction between those two.”
