Rent control proponents announced this week that they have suspended their signature-gathering campaign in Long Beach.
Housing Long Beach, the group that was collecting signatures, initially attempted to qualify its rent control measure for the Nov. 6 ballot, but it missed its June 1 deadline to submit more than the 27,000 signatures required to qualify.
The group then set its sights on submitting the signatures by the next deadline, July 30, in hopes of qualifying the measure for the March 2020 election. Although cutoff to submit signatures is still a couple weeks away, Housing Long Beach has pulled the plug on that effort as well.
“At this point, the coalition faces some insurmountable obstacles and the number of signatures required is too great to continue to ask volunteers to carry on in the face of some absurd opposition,” announced Housing Long Beach, as reported by the Long Beach Press-Telegram.
The Housing Long Beach measure would limit annual rent increases to the rate of inflation and establish “just cause” eviction policies. The measure also would create a rent board and roll back rents to January 2017 levels.
The California Apartment Association was working with its allies to campaign against the measure should it be slated for the ballot.
While signature-gathering has stopped, tenant activists still want to place their measure before city voters in 2020 and will likely begin circulating a rent control petition again in hopes of submitting signatures by a later deadline.
For now, however, the suspension of Housing Long Beach’s signature-gathering campaign is a “win for common sense,” writes Sal Rodriguez, an editorial writer and columnist for the Southern California News Group.
“One only needs to look at a place like San Francisco to see the consequences of rent control. Predictably, after the passage of rent control, landlords there pulled units from the market and rents went up elsewhere as a result,” Rodriguez writes. “That’s probably not what rent control proponents had in mind, but that’s what happens when markets are artificially tinkered with.”
The California Apartment Association will remain vigilant against future attempts to bring rent control to Long Beach and other Southern California cities.
“Throughout Southern California, residents are showing they understand there are better ways to solve housing-affordability issues than price-control policies that have proven to be counterproductive failures,” said Fred Sutton, vice president of public affairs for CAA in Long Beach.