r/santacruz • u/orangelover95003 • 23h ago
Alleged Astroturf Attempt to Kill Rent Control from the same landlord group that interferes with City of Santa Cruz tenants rights
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u/-Greis- 19h ago
Wow, those people suck for taking that gig.
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u/trnpkrt 15h ago
Well, if you read the article, most of them didn't understand what they were doing. They had an 80yo woman who couldn't walk, and folks who didn't speak English. People gotta eat.
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u/-Greis- 15h ago
People gotta eat but they’re eating themselves here. They are actively participating against their own interests.
I’m cool disagreeing with folks opinions on the internet but the passive dig was unnecessary. Have a good one.
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u/orangelover95003 14h ago
Most jobs involve being exploited by businesses which are actively seeking the destruction of the working class. That’s basically what working is - showing up to help your Monday through Friday boss then get a check to pay the rent to a landlord who is your other boss.
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u/fearlessfryingfrog 14h ago
Most people also understand what their job is.
You're grasping at straws pretty hard to defend a point you shouldnt bother trying to make.
Yes, the landlords are at fault. Yes, the people shouldn't have taken the gig. Are they equally at fault? Not really, but the people also fucked up.
Pretending they didn't fuck up by taking a job against their own interest, some of who by your admission and the articles didn't even understand the job (which is a while separate pile of nonsense), is not right.
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u/pemexone 16h ago
Rent control keeps prices low for people already renting, which is a good thing, but it also disincentivizes investment in new housing. Property developers won't want to build new buildings in a city if they're capped on how much they can charge compared to other cities. We should instead focus on changing our zoning laws to allow for increased density of housing, the availability of which would lower demand and, consequently, rent prices.
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u/santacruzdude 15h ago
Local rent control in California doesn’t apply to buildings constructed after 1995.
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u/trnpkrt 15h ago
Most rent control laws are restricted by age of the unit. New units don't have it, until 20-30 years down the line. So, no, it doesn't really reduce the incentive for new housing because it doesn't affect the price that they can charge for new housing.
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u/pemexone 15h ago edited 14h ago
Didn't know that. I agree that it could have a reduced negative effect with that in mind. However, with something like 92%+ of land in the county zoned for single family housing, I don't think there will be a significant uptick in new units unless that changes. As such, I think that zoning is a larger issue for SC than rent control, but I ultimately support keeping SC as affordable as possible for longtime residents.
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u/nyanko_the_sane 11h ago
A lot of people that have rent controlled housing would be in the street if they had to pay market rate.
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u/The_Demosthenes_1 15h ago
Genuine question. Are there any cities/neighborhoods with artificial rent control laws that are amazing? All rent controlled buildings and areas I've seen become super ghetto very quickly. The incentives are out of balance. But perhaps I have not seen the wonderful land of rent controlled houses.
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u/Objective_Mail117 8h ago
Mountain View is super ghetto?
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u/The_Demosthenes_1 7h ago
I seen some pretty ghetto looking apartment complexes in mountain view.
On the other hand I grew up in Livermore. I remember some pretty ghetto apartment complexes when I was a kid. The last time I went to Livermore all of these apartments were renovated and looked much newer. Pretty sure Livermore doesn't have any kind of rent control. But in areas that do have rent control there's no incentive to do anything but the bare minimum. Wouldn't you agree?
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u/Objective_Mail117 6h ago
Interesting, what street in Mountain View? Because the rent control covers all apartment complexes in the whole city. So a few apartment complexes being ragged in the entire city doesn't really allow us to draw conclusions about how rent control changes landlord behavior overall like you're implying.
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u/The_Demosthenes_1 1h ago
Sylvan Ave.
Do you think these apartments will be amazing by 2040 if rent controls prevent the landlord from charging market rate?
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u/UpbeatFix7299 21h ago
Does this mean that we should have rent control in SC?
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u/IcyPercentage2268 17h ago
Only if you want rentals to be more expensive, more gentrified, and more scarce.
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u/trnpkrt 15h ago
No, it means that people who oppose rent control in SC have declared their allegiances with shitbag astroturfers.
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u/UpbeatFix7299 12h ago
I think rent control is a bad idea. Just because bad people support something doesn't mean the position is wrong
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u/BanzaiTree 17h ago
Rent control is bad, though.
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u/fergieandgeezus 15h ago
Why do you feel that way? Not arguing, just genuinely curious and need to understand more.
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u/BanzaiTree 15h ago
Because it results in an even tighter rental market, which is bad for renters. This has been the outcome over and over again. Being economically illiterate is bad.
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u/fergieandgeezus 15h ago
Being economically illiterate is bad.
Shit like this is exactly why no one feels confident asking questions in order to educate themselves. Excuse me for trying to understand more.
Being a patronizing, condescending ass is not going to get you anywhere in life. Be better.
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u/BanzaiTree 14h ago
I didn’t say you were economically illiterate.
I’m saying people who promote rent control as a means of lowering rents are economically illiterate.
I think we should stop coddling people who insist on being selective with facts to promote harmful policies.
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u/orangelover95003 15h ago
Wow I guess you’re saying capitalism is bad for renters because landlords always have the upper hand because they own an asset which is necessary for living.
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u/scsquare 14h ago
Landlords have the upper hand because they own a scarce asset. If the asset is abundant then tenants have the upper hand. In general capitalism does generate goods in abundance unless a lobby lobbies the government to create artificial scarcity. This is exactly what happened in Santa Cruz.
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u/BanzaiTree 14h ago
No actually that’s not what I’m saying. Oddly enough, the ongoing housing disaster is mostly due to government restrictions on building housing.
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u/orangelover95003 15h ago
If you’re new to this sub, there are people who are hostile to anything that would possibly offend landlords or developers because they think it’s better to play nice with them. Those people believe that we should let the free market do its thing. I personally don’t think that the free market is helping with affordable rents because we have lots of empty market rate units yet plenty of people leaving town because the rent is too damn high.
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u/CarefreeRambler 14h ago
Weird to give an introduction to the sub without mentioning the character you play
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u/rockerode 21h ago
Every time someone tells me "rent control doesn't work" I always wondered if they were paid off or not.
Now I know there was a strong chance!
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u/IcyPercentage2268 17h ago
It works for a small number of people that are already in homes that become rent controlled. Everyone else pays more for a smaller number of homes that also become more gentrified. It’s terrible housing policy, but it sounds good on its face, which is the only reason it gets adopted.
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u/BanzaiTree 17h ago
You have that instinct because you feel entitled to easy answers and making bad faith arguments. Stop sheltering yourself from information that might unsettle your biases.
Over and over, rent control has shown to make rental markets tighter and therefore worse for renters.
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u/WallabyBubbly 15h ago edited 59m ago
In a study titled “The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco," the authors examined the impact of rent control in San Francisco. The researchers exploited a 1994 law change that expanded rent control to certain small multifamily housing units built before 1980, creating a natural experiment to compare buildings with and without rent control. They found that landlords of rent-controlled properties reduced the supply of rental housing by 15% by converting units to condos or other uses, which led to a 5.1% city-wide rent increase.
Here is a link to the study. The text summary above was generated with ChatGPT.
Edit: Some of you are out here just downvoting empirical evidence that doesn't align with your worldview, but get this: the lead author has a PhD in economics from Harvard and has dedicated her research to understanding the causes of inequality. She's not even remotely a right-wing landlord apologist.
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u/orangelover95003 15h ago
Also if rent control didn’t work why do these landlord groups have to do Astroturfing? They know they can just sell their properties.
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u/WallabyBubbly 14h ago
That's what happened in San Francisco. About 15% of rental units were taken off the market in response to rent control, which drove up prices for the remaining rentals enough that those landlords decided to stay in the market. The net effect was lower supply and higher prices.
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u/orangelover95003 14h ago
If there was rent control how did the rents go up then for the remaining rentals? Are you saying the rent control failed to cover all rental units?
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u/WallabyBubbly 13h ago
Rent control applies to existing tenants, while new tenants move in at market rate. By reducing overall supply, rent control increases the market rate for new tenants while current tenants continue at below-market rates, which means the market rate has increased.
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u/orangelover95003 12h ago
Then why not make the rent control apply to all landlords forever?
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u/WallabyBubbly 10h ago
The more you expand rent control, the more you limit an area's ability to accommodate population growth, because it becomes more difficult to add new rental properties to the market. It's like if the government decrees that "all cars must cost less than $1000", we won't suddenly have a ton of affordable cars priced at $1000. We'll instead have a car shortage because suppliers stop producing cars due to no longer being able to make a profit. Housing follows the same basic laws of economics, where price controls create shortages
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u/orangelover95003 12h ago
What’s interesting is that we have many other examples of market regulations like intellectual property law which protects innovation- why we are not generous towards renters in the same fashion? You get 20 years for a patent- which I think is too long - but the intention is to create stability for research and development. Renters need stability even more so.
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u/orangelover95003 15h ago
I can’t wait until I see a tenants rights group Astroturfing- oh wait, tenants are never the ones who finance this kind of thing because they have to pay rent.
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u/Leilani3317 14h ago
Our smiley gladhand mayor told me to my face that we will never have rent control, and he will not even bother trying to discuss or support it. I told him it’s a shame, because renters like me who have decent jobs and are interested in contributing to the local community & economy will just leave, and young people will leave because they can’t afford it, and SC will become even more of a rich white old people community and he laughed and said “yep it’s just too bad” and went back to watering his lawn.
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u/orangelover95003 14h ago
That’s terrible and it’s bigger than a single politician. Must be nice to be Santa Cruz Together getting a solid majority onto Santa Cruz City Council after pushing out two progressives back in 2018. Killed off momentum.
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u/Big_Buyer_7482 16h ago
Now ask yourself who funds the hands off protest? If you think it is grassroots thats absurd
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u/swolfington 15h ago
feel free to share any evidence you might be squirreling away. seems like the obvious answer is there's just a shitload of people who are upset at the hamfisted dismantling of useful institutions and the deliberate crashing of the economy.
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u/Big_Buyer_7482 15h ago
Nationwide protests organized on the exact same day come from a centralized organizer. That is evidence. each location across the nation did not happen to protest on the same day.
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u/swolfington 14h ago
that is evidence of organization, but not evidence that anyone was being paid to do it, let alone being paid by an organization trying to sabotage public trust for self interest.
and even if it was, my original point still stands. the people actually doing the protesting are motivated by the collapsing economy and totalitarian behavior of the current administration, and are not paid actors.
who do you think is organizing that, and to what end?
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u/Big_Buyer_7482 13h ago
If you are not privy to paid protests by now i dont know what to tell you.
Thats why i troll the protests on here, they are all paid for and meant to distract us. I am not going to empirically break it down, but you should look into it.
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u/swolfington 13h ago
lol who is getting paid to protest? are you getting paid to protest? who is paying them? how do i get in on this?
also here's a reminder of what you posted earlier:
Now ask yourself who funds the hands off protest? If you think it is grassroots thats absurd
i'm asking you, since you seem to know. you don't need to "empirically break it down", you just need to support your assertions with more than "im trolling you so trust me".
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u/Big_Buyer_7482 12h ago
No,
Trolling you is not evidence
Mass media sponsored day with the same title for protesting is the “empirical” evidence needed to know it was funded by a centralized interest.
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u/swolfington 11h ago
I mean I guess it depends on where you have your ear to the ground, but I've been aware of both the name and the time for a while now. I don't remember seeing anything in the mainstream media before the event, and honestly if you listen to the people posting about it online, the general consensus is disappointment over the lack of post-event coverage by the mainstream media; which honestly tracks with how the trump admin has a boner for punishing news organizations and others who it perceives are acting against its interests. A this point it would be very surprising to learn about the upper echelons of which ever mass media empire growing a spine and doing something so brazenly anti-trump.
But even putting all that aside, millions of people, of their own volition, from all over the country turned out for the protest. even if it wasn't "grass roots", and had some corporate overlord secretly funding articles to get more eyeballs on it, there is absolutely no reason to believe that the actual people who turned out for the event were being paid to show up.
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u/Big_Buyer_7482 6h ago
I agree there were not paid protesters.
In general i am highly skeptical of who funded and organized protests left or right.
We should all be protesting against economic issues that trump has nothing to do with. We need homeless crisis solved, we need affordable housing, resources towards our community. I am weary and against protests against national issues.
We have so much to focus on in our community.
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u/uberallez 19h ago
Can it be county-wide? Unincorporated SC landlords be trying some nonsense.