Editorial News Alert: Pasadena City Council Fails Rental Housing Providers TWICE
On July 8th and July 22nd, the Pasadena City Council considered a charter amendment to modify the existing Pasadena Rental Housing Board (“PRHB” or “Board”). Instead of living up to their responsibility to provide EQUAL representation for the entire community, including rental housing providers, they refused to make any modifications whatsoever to the existing and extremely lopsided Board currently composed of 9 renters and only 2 rental housing providers with 7 specifically dedicated seats for renters and NONE for rental housing providers. There is now no way for the voice of rental housing providers to properly be considered and the Board to pass equitable solutions for the long-term health of Pasadena’s affordable rental housing supply.
While AAGLA attended both meetings in-person to zealous advocate for additional changes to be added to the charter amendment, such pleas feel on deaf ears. At the July 8th meeting many rental housing owners attended in-person and gave moving stories of being unable to reoccupy their rental properties in times of financial need and being locked out by outrageously unaffordable relocation fees of tens of thousands of dollars.
Rather than provide desperately needed help to property owners, the City Council was content in merely approving minor housekeeping issues submitted by the Board to put into the charter amendment for November. The City Council has now missed a golden opportunity to right the grievous and systemic wrong in the Board’s composition. Further, they made no attempt to properly address the fundamentally flawed rental increase formula that uses only a fraction of the Consumer Price Index, dooming rental housing providers to being perpetually unable to even keep up with the cost of inflation. This will invariably lead to greatly reduced affordable rental housing for lower income renters as small owners are forced out of business being unable to keep up with costs of maintaining older buildings. The Pasadena City Council has failed both rental housing providers and renters in Pasadena TWICE.
The sole voice of reason and equity was Council Member Felicia Williams who urged the City Council to consider including these important issues in the charter amendment, so that voters could decide whether they wanted to correct these systemic inequities and their long-term destructive effects on naturally occurring affordable rental housing. Unfortunately, there was no support by the rest of the City Council for such action. Even Council Member Tyron Hampton’s extremely modest request for the Board to create a Task Force to receive rental housing providers’ input was met with stoney silence. Such a Task Force would do no good anyway, as any entity under the Board will be completely ignored as has been the case for rental housing providers that have appeared before the Board since it was created. Instead, the City Council must create its OWN Task Force, so that rental housing providers will have a voice on grossly overreaching and outrageously harmful policies being passed by the RHPB.
After the City Council’s refusal to reformat the Board, the Board was even more emboldened to pass inequitable, harmful and uninformed polices as they rushed to pass yet more regulations at their July 24th meeting to hamper rental housing owners’ ability to receive proper payment from the vast majority of renters in a timely fashion. A separate News Alert will be sent shortly on the final results of that meeting.
In summary, the Pasadena City Council has chosen to turn a blind eye to the plight of all rental housing providers in Pasadena and to sit on their hands and do nothing to try and obtain any semblance of fairness or equity. This will only lead to more mom-and-pop rental housing providers going out of business in Pasadena and their properties being removed from the market as naturally occurring affordable rental housing. Until the City Council wakes up and acknowledges that purposefully harming rental housing providers ultimately harms renters, the City will continue to lose desperately needed affordable housing.
We urge all AAGLA members with rental properties in Pasadena, whether multifamily, single family, Accessory Dwelling Units or condominiums to call and email the City Council to urge them to create a Task Force under the City Council itself, so that rental housing providers voices can at least be heard by them instead of continuing to be ignored by the PRHB. They cannot be allowed to continue to turn a deaf ear to there full community any longer!
To email all Pasadena City Council Members, please click the button below:
EMAIL ALL PASADENA CITY COUNCIL MEMBERS TODAY!
This email button works best for users using Microsoft Office Outlook, but should be functional for all email services. If you experience any issues with the email delivery due to "invalid email addresses", please try replacing the semicolons in between each email address to commas OR try sending the emails individually to each member as all email addresses provided have been checked and cleared for their validity.
TO VIEW THE FULL LIST OF PASADENA CITY COUNCIL MEMBERS EMAILS AND PHONE NUMBERS, PLEASE CLICK HERE
This article is for informational purposes only. If you have any questions regarding your property or specific tenancies and the requirements of any local law changes described herein, please consult with an attorney.