As of 2024, only seven states–—California, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon—and the District of Columbia—offer tenant protections via residential rent control.
Currently, 33 states ban local governments from adapting rent regulation laws.
Only 39 out of 482 cities in California have strong tenant protections.
And only 16 cities in California have rent controls on landlords’ greed: Alameda, Berkeley, Beverly Hills, East Palo Alto, Gardena, Hayward, Los Angeles, Los Gatos, Mountain View, Oakland, Palm Springs, Richmond. San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Monica and West Hollywood.
A common rule of thumb is to spend no more than 30% of your gross monthly income on housing. Yet a May, 2024 Harvard report states that 22.4 million households in the United States spend more than 30% of their income on rent, and 12.1 million spend more than 50%.
In New York City and San Francisco, median monthly rents are over $2,000 for a one-bedroom apartment.
Housing affordability has become a major political issue, especially as the rising tide of homelessness overwhelms cities and states. The Presidential campaign of Donald Trump has blamed Vice President Kamala Harris for the lack of affordable housing.
Yet the insatiable greed of landlords has never been addressed at a federal level—nor in the vast majority of cities and states across the nation.
But there might be hope that it could be.
On August 23, the Justice Department—together with the Attorneys General of North Carolina, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Minnesota, Oregon, Tennessee, and Washington-—filed a civil antitrust lawsuit against RealPage Inc.
RealPage is an American multinational corporation that provides property management software for the multifamily, commercial, single-family, and vacation rental housing industries.
According to the Justice Department, the company engaged in an unlawful scheme to:
- Decrease competition among landlords in apartment pricing; and
- Monopolize the market for commercial revenue management software that landlords use to price apartments:
The lawsuit states: “RealPage’s alleged conduct deprives renters of the benefits of competition on apartment leasing terms and harms millions of Americans.
“RealPage contracts with competing landlords who agree to share with RealPage nonpublic, competitively sensitive information about their apartment rental rates and other lease terms to train and run RealPage’s algorithmic pricing software.
“This software then generates recommendations, including on apartment rental pricing and other terms, for participating landlords based on their and their rivals’ competitively sensitive information.”
One city that has rent control and housing protections for tenants is San Francisco.
To hear slumlords tell it, the city is a “renters’ paradise,” where obnoxious, lazy, rent-evading tenants constantly take advantage of hard-working, put-upon landlords.
Don’t believe it.
The power of slumlords calls to mind the scene in 1987’s The Untouchables, where Sean Connery’s veteran cop tells Eliot Ness: “Everybody knows where the liquor is. It’s just a question of: Who wants to cross Capone?”
Everybody in San Francisco knows who the slumlords are. But the District Attorney’s Office hasn’t criminally prosecuted a slumlord in decades.
Many tenants have lived with rotting floors, bedbugs, nonworking toilets, mice/rats, chipping lead-based paint and other outrages for not simply months but years.
Consider the challenges faced by the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection (DBI), which is charged with ensuring that apartment buildings are in habitable condition.
Under San Francisco law:
- A landlord is automatically given 30 days to correct a health/safety violation.
- If the landlord claims for any reason that he can’t fix the problem within one month, DBI doesn’t demand that he prove this. Instead, it automatically gives him another month.
- A slumlord has to work at being hit with a fine—by letting a problem go uncorrected for three to six months.
- And even then, repeat slumlord offenders often avoid the fine by pleading for leniency.
- That’s because many DBI officials are themselves landlords.
In fact, landlords hold memberships in DBI, the Department of Public Health (DPH) and the San Francisco Rent Board. Which is like having Mafiosi sit on the Board of Directors of the FBI.
But this situation could quickly be turned around—by applying valuable lessons from the “war on drugs” to regulating slumlords.
Consider:
- In 2022, at least 25,000 untested rape kits sat in law enforcement agencies and crime labs across the country.
- But illegal drug kits are automatically rushed to the had of the line.
Why?
It’s because:
- Federal asset forfeiture laws allow the Justice Department to seize properties used to “facilitate” violations of Federal anti-drug laws.
- Local and State law enforcement agencies are allowed to keep some of the proceeds once the property has been sold.
- Thus, financially-strapped police agencies have found that pursuing drug-law crimes is a great way to fill their own coffers.
- Prosecutors and lawmen view the seizing of drug-related properties as crucial to eliminating the financial clout of drug-dealing operations.
It’s long past time for San Francisco agencies to apply the same attitude—and methods—toward slumlords.
DBI should become not merely a law enforcing agency but a revenue-creating one. And those revenues should come from predatory slumlords who routinely violate the City’s laws protecting tenants.
By doing so, DBI could vastly:
- Enhance its own prestige and authority;
- Improve living conditions for thousands of San Francisco renters; and
- Bring millions of desperately-needed dollars into the City’s cash-strapped coffers.