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An ordinance that will provide more relocation benefits for tenants who are displaced from their homes got through the Mountain View City Council last week, after the vote was delayed in October at the request of landlords.
In a unanimous vote, the City Council approved updates to a local ordinance that requires property owners to pay relocation costs for income-eligible households that are forced to move due to redevelopment, or because their homes are taken off the rental market.
Back in October, the City Council deferred voting on proposed updates to the Tenant Relocation Assistance Ordinance after receiving significant pushback from landlords who said they had not been sufficiently informed about the changes. The City Council instead voted to delay a decision to a future meeting to allow time for more community input. Since then, the city has held two meetings soliciting feedback from tenant and landlord groups.
“I applaud the council for taking an extra step to allow us to really research things, instead of doing government on the sly,” Council member John McAlister said at the Dec. 9 meeting.
The ordinance updates largely align with Senate Bill 330, a state housing law that aims to reduce tenant displacement. The city also included other protections, like allowing for increased relocation benefits.
Currently, displaced households receive three months of rent for a comparable unit in Mountain View. Under the new provisions, the relocation benefits for low-income households will increase by roughly $9,400, adjusted annually for inflation, according to an Oct. 28 council report.
“It’s been a long slog,” Council member Emily Ann Ramos said. “The whole purpose of this was to help mitigate, or partially mitigate, displacement in our community… This is a really good step forward for our residents.”
But while expanding some benefits, the city also made modifications after the October meeting to lessen the impact on landlords. The ordinance that the City Council passed last week set a monetary cap on moving expenses, rather than leaving it open ended. The maximum one-way moving cost that a landlord will be required to cover is $1,670 for a one-bedroom unit, $2,250 for a two-bedroom unit, and $2,880 for a three-bedroom or larger unit, according to the Dec. 9 council report.
The city also is giving landlords and developers a more flexible timeline to carry out renovations that temporarily displace tenants. The city had initially proposed to allow 90 days for small-scale renovations but extended the timeline up to 120 days with a possible 60-day extension, according to the council report.
Anil Babbar of the California Apartment Association, an organization that represents the rental housing industry, praised the changes as “good guardrails” to the ordinance updates. But he also expressed general dissatisfaction with the ordinance, describing it as an added burden for landlords and developers.
“Every cost, whether it’s the cost of housing a tenant in a different residence or the cost of moving a tenant, adds thousands of dollars of expense to every unit,” he said.
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“Every cost, whether it’s the cost of housing a tenant in a different residence or the cost of moving a tenant, adds thousands of dollars of expense to every unit,” he said. What he doesn’t say is that unless other communities in the South Bay adopt substantially similar guidelines, investors will choose to invest elsewhere and we will have difficulty meeting our housing construction goals.