Publication Date: Friday May 26, 1995
A bill that would drastically modify East Palo Alto's 11-year-old rent control law easily passed a floor vote in the state Senate on Monday and is heading toward the Assembly and final passage.
The bill, SB 1257, would provide for a phasing in of vacancy decontrol in rent control cities around the state, including East Palo Alto, Berkeley and Santa Monica. It would allow 50 percent rent increases over the first three years of vacancy decontrol, and no limits on rent increases afterward.
East Palo Alto officials have lobbied state Sen. Tom Campbell, R-Stanford, on the issue, including sending an unannounced delegation of rent control advocates to his district office last Friday.
William Webster, a member of the city's Rent Stabilization Board and part of last Friday's delegation, was critical of Campbell for not being available to meet with them.
But Campbell aide Casey Beyer said the group didn't give any warning they were coming.
Casey said either Campbell or his staff met with East Palo Alto residents "five or six times" in the last year and a half on the issue, including a meeting last year with then Mayor Sharifa Wilson and Vice Mayor Bill Vines, at which Wilson brought up the subject.
"It's not that we haven't heard them," Beyer said. "And they have been very eloquent. But Tom has a philosophical difference with them on this issue."
Campbell voted for SB 1257 Monday and he earlier supported it in committee, believing that the free market instead of local controls should determine rent levels.
The argument property advocates have long used against rent control is that it reduces the availability of rental housing over time. Studies of Berkeley and Santa Monica have supported that contention. But East Palo Alto's rental housing stock has increased in the 11 years since the city first passed rent control.
Locally, rent control has been one of the most divisive issues in East Palo Alto politics, but the voters have affirmed it three times and a majority of City Council members have also supported it.
The passage of SB 1257 in the Senate on Monday was a landmark victory for property advocates who have been trying to pass such legislation for a dozen years. The Senate has generally been regarded as the barrier to such legislation, and the Assembly as an easier hurdle for property advocates.
But, as Beyer noted, the Assembly leadership is in disarray right now with Speaker Willie Brown's future in doubt, so it's hard to predict how the Assembly will deal with SB 1257, or when.
--Don Kazak