In the past couple of years, several local cities including San Diego, Imperial Beach and Chula Vista have enacted laws that are known as “tenant protection ordinances” on top of California’s tenant protections, which are already the strictest in the nation.
So why did another local City Council recently vote against creating a TPO?
In Oceanside, City Councilmember Rick Robinson reversed his vote on a proposed TPO that would have gone beyond state law. His honesty was refreshing, and his reasoning was exactly right.
Robinson explained that while the ordinance was well-intentioned, “What we did is not going to keep people in their homes.” He said he listened to the small “mom-and-pop” landlords in his community. In the end, he concluded that adding more local rules and red tape doesn’t solve the real problem.
He’s right. And now, national research shows just how costly these regulations can be for renters.
A study released this summer confirms what housing providers in San Diego already know: overregulation increases rents, especially for lower-income renters and those in small properties.
How much does rent go up? It turns out that eviction laws such as TPOs are estimated to increase rents about $1,764 per unit annually in the San Diego metropolitan area, according to study author MetroSight. The study, which was sponsored by the National Apartment Association and National Multifamily Housing Council, analyzed data from hundreds of metro areas.
That means the Oceanside ordinance wouldn’t have prevented displacement. It would have made rents higher across the board.
Those costs hit hardest at lower-income renters and people living in small apartment buildings — exactly the populations these laws claim to protect.
Politicians designed these duplicative laws to create mounds of paperwork, going so far as to specify the font size of notices that landlords must provide to renters. In fact, Southern California Rental Housing Association had to create 16 different forms — in addition to normal leasing documents — just to keep members compliant across three cities.
In San Diego County, we’re already seeing the effects of overlapping local ordinances layered on top of strict statewide laws. For corporate landlords with compliance departments, that’s burdensome but possible. For smaller landlords, it’s discouraging.
Robinson’s change of heart should be a wake-up call. We all want stable housing. We all want to prevent homelessness. But pretending that more red tape will accomplish that is misleading.
What really works is building more housing and supporting programs that keep people whole, such as local rental assistance and shallow subsidies for seniors. Those strategies lower rents, increase supply, and give families real stability.
The MetroSight study confirms what housing providers have said for years: regulations that go beyond state law don’t help renters; they hurt them.
Landlords are tired of being scapegoated for policy failures. No amount of finger-pointing at landlords will fix the fact that we haven’t built enough housing and that state and local regulations have driven up the cost of the homes we do have.
As fingers are pointed at landlords, it’s important to note that most local cities are way behind on meeting their own state housing goals. San Diego, for example, has only approved about 30,000 new homes since 2020 — less than one-third of the 108,000 homes it is supposed to add between 2020 and 2029.
Policymakers who are serious about affordability should follow Robinson’s example. It’s time to admit that punitive local ordinances are the wrong tool.
Alan Pentico is the executive director of the Southern California Rental Housing Association.
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