Are Single Family Houses Covered Under Oakland Control
If you're a tenant in Oakland, there are laws that spell out how much your landlord is allowed to charge you for monthly rent, when they tin can and can't evict you, and what steps you can take if they harass yous.
But which of these protections applies to you depends on what kind of building you alive in. Correct now, the but way to find out if and how you lot're protected past Oakand's rent control policies is to accept some familiarity with the ready of complicated country and local housing laws, or to know someone who does.
That's 1 of the reasons why many tenants and supporters want Oakland to create a "rental registry," a database of every rental unit in the city. Many rent-controlled cities, like Berkeley and San Francisco, have such a database.
Registries vary in the types of data they runway, typically including the addresses of all rental units that are field of study to a policy like rent control, and the bodily or legal rent prices for each flat. Sometimes they note whether an apartment is currently occupied or vacant, who owns information technology, or whether previous renters have been evicted. Sometimes these registries are publicly accessible online, and sometimes the records are kept internally by cities.
There is no rental registry for Oakland, just staff from the city's Rent Adjustment Program (RAP) have been studying the possibility of launching ane and program on presenting initial findings to the City Quango this summer. Ultimately, the council would need to give approval for the urban center to create the database.
Currently, all Oakland landlords are required to annals the addresses of their properties in order to receive a business license, and they must pay $101 special fee per rent-controlled unit they ain. This coin is dedicated to administering the Hire Aligning Programme, or RAP, which handles disputes between tenants and landlords and manages the city's rental housing laws. Oakland landlords practise not need to provide addresses for each individual unit they manage or what they're charging for hire.
At a March meeting of the council, Chanée Franklin Minor, RAP director, called a registry the "final component to creating a truly active rent control program."
"We're charged with making sure that rents are stable and excessive rents aren't charged, and that people aren't leaving because of that," she said. "Nosotros're unable to practise that if we're not tracking rents—if we don't accept a system to do what we're tasked to do."
Just many landlords are wary of what they consider nonetheless another bureaucratic imposition. Some are concerned about releasing besides much data nigh their business publicly. Others are concerned that the registry might require them to pay another fee. And in some cities, hire registries come up with steep penalties for failing to register your unit of measurement: inability to collect hire or to evict, for case.
Country Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, who represents parts of Oakland, has repeatedly tried to pass a law requiring a statewide rental registry. Each time she does, landlord and real manor interest groups like the California Apartment Clan anteroom against it. Wicks' third rent registry bill only died in the assembly, meaning she will have to reintroduce it side by side session for it to have some other chance.
But Oakland renters and tenant-friendly members of the Metropolis Council accept signaled that they want to button alee with a local registry shortly.
Renters say they deserve basic information about their rights
When renters come up to counseling sessions held by the Oakland Tenants Matrimony (OTU), they frequently want to know whether they're covered past the city's rent-control policy, in club to figure out whether their landlord is overcharging them.
Under Oakland rent control, landlords can set rents at any toll they want when a tenant moves in, but they tin can only raise the hire by a small-scale per centum each twelvemonth afterwards that. Not all renters receive these protections, though. A state law chosen the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Human activity excludes all buildings constructed after 1995, or the twelvemonth a local ordinance was passed—1983, in Oakland'southward example—from hire control. It also says unmarried-family homes tin't be rent-controlled.
"Most people don't know offhand" when their apartment was built, said Emily Wheeler, an OTU member who advises tenants. Counselors similar Wheeler don't always know what to tell them, fifty-fifty when they figure out the construction year. At that place are cases when landlords may have received exemptions from hire control fifty-fifty though an apartment was congenital earlier 1983 or, conversely, a unit may await like information technology's an exempt single-family home but is technically considered an apartment edifice. A registry would eliminate the mystery.
Tenants covered by hire control also receive other housing and eviction protections in Oakland, and so knowing the status of your building can make a big departure.
"Every bit a tenant myself, if I ever wanted to move someplace, a rent registry would make information technology easier for me to find out if a identify is covered," said Mark Dias, OTU co-chair. "People should know that basic level of data nigh where they're living."
Dias and Wheeler said the dataset will only exist consummate, even so, if it includes rent-controlled units plus all others, including apartments in new, high-terminate buildings, and single-family homes operated as rental housing.
According to RAP staff, the registry under consideration would include simply rent-controlled housing.
"I'm concerned it'southward non going to exist comprehensive," Dias said. "Oakland has a lot of unhoused folk, and it would exist nice to know how many backdrop on the market right now are non being rented out for whatever reason."
Just fifty-fifty if the registry covers only rent-controlled properties, the database would dramatically increase the potential for enforcement of that policy. Currently, the onus is on tenants to file a complaint with the Rent Adjustment Programme if they believe they've been given an illegal rent increase. With the registry, city staff could easily identify violations themselves and proactively contact landlords—who in many cases may be unfamiliar with the policy and may have made an honest mistake.
Landlords fear government overreach
Derek Barnes, who represents local landlords equally the CEO of the East Bay Rental Housing Association, doesn't oppose a bones rental registry.
"Simply put, it's a way to register the business you're doing in the city—in this case providing rental housing—and somehow approving your credentials to do that." he said.
Beyond that, "it really depends on the kind of data they're collecting," he said. "How invasive it is, how intrusive, how onerous, and how often information technology's collected. Information technology can offset to snowball into this huge data collection endeavour."
Landlords in some cities, including San Jose, accept sued over privacy concerns related to registries, and sometimes they're supported by renters. These concerns mainly come upwardly in cities that collect or publicly disclose the names of both landlords and tenants.
Belongings owners are also aware of the extra work it would have for the urban center to create and continually manage a database of every Oakland rental. "Someone's paying for that," said Barnes. Landlords fear they'll exist asked to pes the bill for the registry on top of the fees and taxes already required of them. In improver to the RAP fee paid by landlords with hire-controlled units, all landlords must pay Oakland's business organisation license tax, which is about $14 for every $ane,000 they accept in.
"The idea of calculation additional areas of compliance and demands really sets off a lot of housing providers," Barnes said. "It impairs our ability to run our businesses. Housing providers are sensitive to the tendency to overreach, and the government telling them how to run their business where that might not be the case in other industries."
He said the registry concept would be more palatable to landlords if they receive "value" from it, and if they're able to use information technology to "mitigate adventure," for case past getting notified when they're about to be upwardly for mandatory inspections.
How do rent registries work in other cities?
Oakland and Berkeley have relatively similar, and strong, tenant protections. Just Berkeley has used a rent registry for many years, enabling city staff to better communicate with landlords and tenants, enforce policies, and become a sense of how expensive it is to live there, said Matt Chocolate-brown, acting director of the Berkeley Rent Board.
"We have data going back to 1980 virtually what rent levels are for the city of Berkeley," Brown said. That database will soon expand greatly because in 2020 voters approved a measure out requiring all units, not just those subject to rent control, to be registered. For the kickoff time, Berkeley volition be able to determine metrics similar the city's average hire, instead of relying on anecdotal reports or real estate sites that draw from only their own listings.
"Information technology's incredibly valuable to track affordability," said Brown. Such data can inform everything from minimum wage laws to homeless housing programs.
The Rent Board uses the registry to "communicate with landlords and tenants several times a year, to permit them know what their rents tin can exist," Brown said.
In both Berkeley and Oakland, renters who live in the same building tin be paying wildly different amounts, because rents are reset for each unit when someone new moves in. Simply Oakland doesn't require landlords to tell the city the addresses or rents for individual units, so at that place'south no like shooting fish in a barrel way for housing staff to communicate directly with renters or to decide what the legal rent is.
Landlords in Berkeley are required to annals all new tenancies, telling the urban center the name and contact information for the tenant, the initial rent level and start date, and utilities covered. Tenants tin expect up their unit in an online database chosen My Rent Ceiling, to find out the maximum they're allowed to exist charged for hire. (The city doesn't post tenant or landlord names.)
"That makes it much easier to do outreach and education, and for people to enforce their rights and responsibilities," Brown said.
Source: https://oaklandside.org/2021/05/28/does-oakland-need-a-rental-housing-registry/
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