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The California Apartment Association this week issued an “Industry Insight” paper to help rental housing owners comply with a Section 8-related ordinance taking effect Jan. 1 in the city of Los Angeles. Effective New Year’s Day, the city’s “source of income protection” law will require that landlords consider for tenancy all applicants with the ability to pay for a given unit, including those who would pay their rent using Section 8. This ordinance mirrors the provisions in SB 329, a statewide Section 8-related law also taking effect Jan. 1. Both the L.A. ordinance and SB 329 ban blanket policies against renting… Read More

Tagged: Los Angeles

Regulations interpreting the reasonable accommodation and disparate impact discrimination provisions of the California Fair Employment and Housing Act take effect at the beginning of the new year.   The “disparate impact” impact regulations specifically address how a plaintiff would make a disparate impact claim based on the discriminatory use of criminal background checks.  The approach of the regulations is similar to the “Office of General Counsel Guidance on Application of Fair Housing Act Standards to the Use of Criminal Records by Providers of Housing and Real Estate-Related Transactions” issued by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2016. 

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Citing the passage of AB 1482, the Larkspur City Council earlier this month rejected proposals to institute local “just cause,” rent control and rent-registry ordinances. Since early September, the California Apartment Association’s North Bay staff has provided strong opposition to the city’s effort to adopt restrictive policies on rental units in in Larkspur, a small city in Marin County. Testifying to the City Council, Alex Khafin, CAA’s vice president of public affairs for the North Bay, argued that “just cause eviction and rent-cap policies will have serious unintended consequences and will not provide a single additional unit of affordable housing,… Read More

Tagged: North Bay

Long Beach City Council members Tuesday voted to repeal their tenant-relocation ordinance, concluding that the local measure would be unnecessary once AB 1482 takes effect. The ordinance will be repealed effective Jan. 1 2020, the same day that the state will begin implementing AB 1482, California’s new statewide rent control and “just cause” eviction law.

Tagged: Los AngelesLong Beach

California’s largest businesses, including those in the rental housing industry, have just a few weeks to begin complying with the nation’s most sweeping consumer-privacy law. The California Consumer Privacy Act takes effect Jan. 1 and is intended to give consumers greater insights into data that companies collect about them — and more control over what happens to that data. The law, which is being compared to the European Union’s privacy laws, mainly targets large companies — those with annual revenues of $25 million or more — as well as firms in the business of collecting and selling personal information. Although… Read More

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An urgency “just cause” ordinance that would have placed immediate restrictions on tenancy terminations has failed to get the required supermajority vote of the Vallejo City Council. On Tuesday, only four of the seven council members voted for the measure, and five votes are needed to pass any urgency ordinance that takes effect immediately. Instead, the City Council voted to leave in place an existing local proclamation of emergency that caps any rent increases in Vallejo at 10%, but only through Dec. 31, 2019. That’s because beginning Jan. 1, 2020, the rent cap and “just cause” tenancy termination restrictions under… Read More

Tagged: Solano

The California Apartment Association is gearing up for another campaign to keep radical forms of rent control out of California. Once again, anti-housing crusader Michael Weinstein is using the initiative process in an attempt to resurrect the radical rent control policies of the 1970s – policies that would place homes further out of reach for seniors and working families and exacerbate California’s homelessness crisis. At a series of rallies Thursday, Weinstein and other tenant activists announced they had enough signatures to qualify their latest radical rent control measure for the November 2020 ballot.

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Refusing to bow to pressure from a splinter group of tenant advocates, the Sacramento City Council ignored demands to place a rent control and “just cause” initiative on the March 3, 2020, primary election ballot. The initiative, known as the Sacramento Renter Protection and Community Stabilization Charter Amendment, already qualified to be placed on a future ballot. It’s up to the City Council to determine whether the measure will appear on the ballot of the next primary, general or special election. The registrar of voters set a Dec. 6 deadline for the City Council to approve placing an initiative on… Read More

Tagged: Sacramento Valley

Working with the California Apartment Association, the Santa Rosa City Council has created a $100,000 fund to compensate landlords should they lose money through their participation in the Section 8 program. Since early September, CAA North Bay staff has worked with the city of Santa Rosa on the establishment of this risk-mitigation program.

Tagged: North Bay

With the spread of “just cause” eviction requirements throughout the state, it has become increasingly important for landlords to develop and consistently apply appropriate screening criteria to potential tenants. Those screening criteria commonly include income requirements, rental history, and credit requirements, among other things. Landlords typically obtain much of that information through reports provided by third-party screening companies. However, a complex web of federal and state laws imposes detailed requirements on the collection and use of that information. One such state law is the Investigative Consumer Reporting Agencies Act, or ICRAA, which was first enacted in 1975 and has been… Read More

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