California YIMBY Statement on AB 1157

Californians are rightly frustrated over the spiraling cost of rent. Due to our acute housing shortage, hundreds of thousands of Californians are forced to spend most of their income on rent, live in overcrowded conditions, or leave the state each year. 

This is not an abstract issue for us. Nearly every member of our team is a renter.

For this reason, California YIMBY supported and helped pass AB 1482, the most significant tenant protections ever enacted in California state law. The bill capped rent increases at 5% plus inflation, with a maximum annual increase of 10% – and also provided just-cause requirements for landlords seeking to evict their tenants.

These protections were an important stop-gap, and also weren’t perfect – rent control regulations can have unintended consequences. But the ultimate way to protect tenants is to ensure that they have lots of housing options when a landlord tries to increase the rent; that requires housing abundance. Landlords should be competing for tenants, not the other way around.

We also need to be clear-eyed about the views and actions of California voters, who have been asked three times at the ballot to express their opinions on strict rent control. On all three occasions, they have rejected it. 

Meanwhile, due almost entirely to our acute housing shortage and affordability crisis, thousands of working-class Californians flee the state every year for states that build more homes. These are almost always states where rent control is prohibited by state law, where unfunded inclusionary zoning is prohibited by state law, and where there are limited taxpayer resources for affordable housing. 

The message should be clear: We don’t have a rent control crisis; we don’t have an inclusionary zoning crisis; we have a homebuilding crisis, much of which is due to the costly, byzantine, and too-often unrealistic expectations about increasing the cost of new homes to pay the cost of fixing a variety of social ills.

While the provisions of AB 1157 are well-intentioned, we are concerned that imposing increasingly strict price controls every few years could dissuade the housing production our state needs – addressing a symptom of the crisis while making the underlying disease worse. 

Notably, the law extends price controls to ADUs, which has been one of the only bright spots in California housing in recent years.

These concerns were raised during committee proceedings, and we share these concerns with our partners and allies.

We appreciate Asm. Kalra’s steadfast commitment to protecting vulnerable tenants and renters from rising rents and evictions. We are committed to working with him on pro-housing, pro-renter reforms that will achieve our shared goals without the risk of unintended consequences to our urgent housing production goals.