The City of Santa Barbara, California, passed several new protections for renters on January 9. The tenant protections package enacted by the city seeks not only to rectify longstanding power imbalances between landlords and tenants but also to address a growing housing affordability crisis.
The Santa Barbara City Council passed, in a 6-1 vote, a measure that will allow tenants who have faced a no-fault eviction from their residence due to housing renovations, known also as “renovictions,” the “right of first refusal,” which grants tenants the ability to re-rent their unit once renovations are completed. The right of first refusal was originally passed by the county seat in July 2023; however, the Santa Barbara City Council voted to implement such protections for renters citywide to ensure that tenants at both the city- and county-level receive the same coverage.
In addition, city councilmembers voted to enforce protections for tenants who may face harassing and retaliatory behavior from landlords and property owners, imposing financial consequences on individuals who engage in such behavior towards tenants of up to $1,000 per violation. The vote, which came after four hours of internal discussion, ultimately ended with the Council choosing to forego a third amendment and abandoning tenant advocates’ top priority: rent stabilization for the city’s lowest-income renters.
“Tenants – especially the working class, people of color, the disabled, the undocumented, survivors of domestic violence, and some of our most vulnerable neighbors – continue to have a massive dollar sign bullseye on our backs,” said Stanley Tzankov, cofounder of the Santa Barbara Tenants Union. “Sadly, a majority of our elected officials continue to fail in protecting its people and our housing affordability more broadly. There are a lot of great provisions we won – putting a halt on harassment from landlords and limiting renovations to just safety and habitability reasons, not elective and cosmetic changes – but we desperately need a rent cap once those repairs are done. Our city and region deserve these long overdue, broadly popular, policy best practices to rein in bad faith landlords, especially the increasingly common corporate flippers, and put an end to the predatory practice of renovictions. And we need to limit runaway rent increases more broadly with rent stabilization efforts and bold social housing production.”
Renovictions typically occur when a landlord or property owner claims that they are making improvements to a residential unit and that they will need the property vacated, legally displacing the tenant from their home through the eviction process. In this way, the landlord can make minor repairs to the unit (if any) before putting the residence back on the market at a higher rental rate. The renoviction process, which impacts the entire rental market, has contributed to skyrocketing rental rates in Santa Barbara and has in turn helped make the city one the most expensive localities in the United States. Between 2021 and 2022, rental rates in Santa Barbara increased by as much as 9% in some parts of the city, bringing the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment to $2,935.
Corporate landlords are typically the most common group to engage in renovictions. In 2022, Santa Barbara saw $141 million in sales to larger real estate companies involving 20 apartment buildings. The sale of these units led to hundreds of individuals being evicted from their properties at the same time. Santa Barbara has a 1.7% vacancy rate, and more than 60% of its residents are renters, meaning tenants have limited housing options once an eviction has been filed against them.
In response to the wave of renovictions, lawmakers in Santa Barbara attempted to reduce evictions over the last year by passing a number of tenant protections at both the city and county levels. In July 2023, the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors passed “just cause” eviction standards for tenants, ensuring that a tenant cannot be unlawfully evicted from their residence without good cause. Under the law, a landlord or property owner must also offer a tenant a “no-fault” reason for eviction in cases involving renovation, indicating the cause of the eviction filing was not the tenant’s actions, and absolving the tenant of wrongdoing while allowing them to assert an affirmative defense in court.
The law passed by the County Board of Supervisors also gives tenants the right to renew their lease for a minimum of one year once their landlord has completed remodeling their unit and requires landlords to make certain that their remodeling brings a unit up to local health and safety codes.
The campaign to strengthen Santa Barbara’s city-level tenant protections began in October 2023, when the City Council proposed the enactment of a virtual verbatim copy of the county’s laws, plus a provision that adds rental increase caps to the ordinance. Currently, the State of California has rent stabilization measures in place; however, the protections ensured by “Assembly Bill 1482” – which caps rental increases at 10% annually, or 5% plus the change in cost of living – will only be in place for 10 years and exclude certain properties from coverage (see Memo, 9/23/19).
Tenant organizers in Santa Barbara have long advocated for rent stabilization. Housing advocates across the city and region have called specifically for localized rental caps (in conjunction with the state’s temporary rent stabilization protections) to deal with the steady rise of renovictions that have been occurring en masse since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, a coalition led by the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE) successfully organized to enact rent stabilization in nearby Oxnard, making Oxnard the sixth-largest city in California to do so. in the nearby city of Oxnard, making Oxnard the sixth-largest city in California to do so.
Ultimately, the proposed rent cap amendment was not passed by the Santa Barbara City Council, even after more than three months of delayed voting, on the grounds that there were insufficient data available to assess the percentage increase by which rent should be capped per year. Still, advocates and tenant leaders plan to continue to push the City Council to enact rent stabilization at the city level.
To read more about Santa Barbara’s new tenant protections, visit the Santa Barbara City Council website here.
To learn more about the Santa Barbara Tenants Union, visit its website here.