The San Jose City Council next week will consider an aggressive timeline for rolling out harsher rent control policies.
The implementation date and other issues related to San Jose’s Apartment Rent Ordinance will come up when the council meets Tuesday, May 10.
Two weeks ago, the City Council voted 6-5 to lower maximum annual rent increases on rent controlled units from 8 percent to 5 percent.
City officials had been considering a moratorium on rent growth until the harsher rules take effect, but according to the San Jose Mercury News, that idea is being shelved.
“We decided that it might be more efficient to just implement the drop immediately — as quickly as possible — to go from 8 percent to 5 percent,” Jacky Morales-Ferrand, the city’s housing director, said in this Mercury News article. “Then we wouldn’t have to address the issue of the freeze, which frankly I thought would have many more concerns and challenges from landlords.”
Indeed, Joshua Howard, CAA’s senior vice president of local government affairs, was irked by the rent-freeze proposal.
“It sends the message from City Hall that they don’t trust the housing providers in San Jose,” Howard told the newspaper. “It seems like an overreaction to an unfounded concern.”
The council Tuesday could approve an urgency ordinance that lowers the annual rent cap immediately, however, this move would require a super majority — unlikely considering the split vote to revise the rent control ordinance April 19.
On the other hand, it would only take a simple majority to schedule the rent control changes to take effect in late June – something Howard said property owners weren’t expecting to happen until early next year.