California limits rent increases to 10% a year for tenants living in apartments built before 1995.
But a law known as Costa-Hawkins prevents cities and counties from passing further rent control, like for newer buildings, single-family homes or new tenants.
The Justice for Renters Act, Proposition 33, would repeal that law, allowing cities and counties to create local rent control laws for any housing.
Jose Lopez, who leads the San Diego Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, said passing rent control “matters a whole lot.”
“Especially for the thousands of Californians who are really one rent increase away from having to move out of their homes,” he said.
Typical monthly rent for a California apartment has risen about $500 over the last 7 years.
In San Diego, the middle of the range of all apartments for rent is more than $2,600 a month, according to Zillow.
And homelessness is increasing, despite more being spent to address it.
Lopez is advocating for families like his own.
“I eventually became an organizer, and I couldn't believe that they actually would pay me to go and talk to people about the things that most people told me to just be quiet about,” he said.
He was paying a little over $2,100 in monthly rent, he said.
After a leaky sink flooded his family's home, he said the landlord evicted them, remodeled and raised the rent.
He now pays almost $3,800 a month to live a couple blocks away.
He said they had to invite his brother to live with them and pay part of the rent.
Lopez and other Proposition 33 supporters are up against a long list of local leaders who oppose Prop. 33, including state Sen. Toni Atkins, San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria and the mayors of Carlsbad, Chula Vista, San Marcos and Vista.
The list also includes some pro-affordable housing groups like California YIMBY.
Apartment and realtor associations have donated more than $67 million to fight the measure — compared to nearly $42 million given in support of the measure.
Lucinda Lilley, who recently served as president of the Southern California Rental Housing Association, said she and other opponents to the proposition don’t see the housing crisis as landlords versus renters.
“We'd love to get together and work out solutions rather than just get hammered every time somebody comes up with an idea that says, ‘You own rental housing, therefore you're really rich, therefore you're a bad person, therefore I'm going to screw you over,’” she said.
She said rent increases are necessary to cover repairs because most housing in the city of San Diego is more than 30 years old.
She said California over-regulates rental housing already, and it’s driving landlords out of the market.
More rent control would make that worse, she argued, and discourage developers from building new housing.
Rent control laws don’t target the families that need it most, Lilley said. High-income renters receive it just like low-income renters, even when they can afford to pay more.
Instead, she would like to see local governments expand their housing voucher programs, and offer more short-term rental assistance.
“A lot of times it's a matter of, ‘My car broke down, I can't afford to pay my rent. I just need a short term loan to get me through the next month,’” Lilley said.
It’s the third time the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) is sponsoring this kind of measure in the past six years. The last two times, about 60% of voters turned it down.
The foundation and its director, Michael Weinstein, have been criticized for funding these efforts instead of improving a Skid Row apartment building in Los Angeles. This month, AHF settled with tenants for more than half a million dollars over an alleged failure to provide safe and habitable housing.
Weinstein told LAist that criticism was unfair.
“We have spared no expense in improving these buildings, but we have to look towards the bigger picture,” he said. “We need to look at how we can keep expanding the pool of affordable housing. And if we have rent hikes forcing people out on the street, we're never going to solve the problem.”
In 2021, the University of Minnesota analyzed more than a dozen studies on the impacts of rent control.
They found it does work to keep rent lower and increase housing stability for current tenants.
They said there’s not much evidence that it reduces new construction or housing quality.
But they found rent control does tend to reduce the total number of rental units as owners take them off the market.
Ricardo Flores, director of the Local Support Initiative Coalition of San Diego — a nonprofit that advocates for affordable housing — said rent control isn’t a perfect solution, but it’s necessary.
“You've got to stop the crisis and then think about where to go from here,” he said.
And he thinks it has to be done with changes to zoning.
“We don't really have the luxury to say, ‘Well, let's do one or let's do the other.’” he said. “We have to do this .... or else people just are not going to be able to survive. Literally, survive.”
Increasingly, people have to choose between buying food and medicine or paying rent, he said.
Single-family only zoning takes up more than 80% of the city of San Diego’s residential land. Flores argued the city should eliminate single-family zoning to allow for enough affordable housing to be built.
San Diego has a housing crisis. But he said it’s a solvable one.
“This is not putting a man on Mars or a woman on Mars,” he said.
KPBS reporter Katie Hyson will moderate a panel at Politifest on Saturday. Sept. 28 where attendees can hear Lilley and others debate this measure and inform their vote.
