Courtesy of the San Diego Tenants Union
The San Diego Tenants Union is Vehemently Opposed to the Mayor and Council President’s ‘watered down’ Tenant Protection Ordinance (TPO). While tenants are in desperate need of stronger tenant protections, the Ordinance slated for a vote by City Council on Tuesday, April 25, 2023 is a terrible idea contrived by the rental housing industry and carried out by the Mayor. Why has Mayor Todd Gloria changed the TPO to make it an ineffective tool that actually weakens tenant protection in San Diego? The Mayor is pushing for the opposite of what tenant rights advocates have been working on for years. Since the moratorium expired, landlords have utilized loopholes in the state law to displace tenants. Thankfully, in San Diego tenants and their representatives have been able to fight back and defeat substantial remodel/demolition eviction attempts by employing protections provided by the San Diego Right to Know ordinance. The proposed TPO will change this and will turn San Diego’s more restrictive Just Cause protections into a loophole riddled policy.
Instead of slowing displacement, Mayor Gloria’s version of the TPO will actually have the opposite impact.
Homelessness and displacement will shoot up, causing the rents to skyrocket when the CA 2019 Tenant Protection Act is set to expire in January of 2030. Tenants who are burdened by their current rents will find it nearly impossible to afford to stay living within the City of San Diego. In an NBC7 news interview, Council President Sean Elo understands this to be the case, yet, there is no active effort to even consider the stronger tenant protections that advocates have been proposing for years.
The Relocation Assistance in LA and San Francisco were passed decades ago and provide tenants with significantly greater assistance than the two measly months offered by the Mayor’s TPO. Displaced tenants will be forced out of CA rent stabilized units and forced to pay ever increasingly unaffordable “market rate” rents. This is a recipe for disaster that will raise housing costs for everybody and will quickly break our already strained homelessness and tenant assistance programs. San Diego is still controlled by developers, this policy is yet another evidentiary example that politicians are controlled mouthpieces of the bourgeoisie.
The same 20 year old policies are being pushed by the same group of politicians who have been at the helm of power for that entire time. San Diego just registered the highest homelessness rates and highest rental payment rates in its history. According to a 2021 Zillow study, San Diego is the worst place in the country for Black Renters. As of 2022, it is the 5th most expensive city to rent in the country. Instead of addressing the desperate need for rent control, which most tenant protection packages contain *For obvious reasons, San Diego’s leaders are demonstrating that they are detached from reality by proposing such a regressive policy. The TPO opens a loophole that doesn’t currently exist as a just cause reason for eviction in the San Diego Right to Know Ordinance, effectively weakening tenant protections for long term tenants in San Diego.
Developers are drooling in front of the hen house, waiting for their anointed politicians to open the door to devour the tenants. Community partners should not accept a proposal that harms tenants on the premise that City Council will pass amendments improving the policy. The TPO proposal should be opposed, scrapped and brought forth again after the loopholes are gone and tenant input is reflected in the policy. Tenant organizations and Tenant Unions are pushing for real, substantive, permanent protections in San Diego and throughout California. The San Diego Tenants Union membership hopes the protections that are being carved into law are not carved with the blood, sweat and tears of the constituents whom elected officials claim to serve; only to fatten the pockets of developers and large property owners.
