ORANGE COUNTY, Calif. — For Elsa Montero, life in the past 15 years has just been a series of moving from one place to another.

The 48-year-old said it seems like every two to three years, she finds herself in a different and cheaper apartment because her previous landlord increased her rent. Sometimes the annual rent hike was an additional $50 a month. Other times it’s $100 a month. At other times, she’s experienced some landlords hiking her rent twice in a single year, she said.

For someone living month to month, the rent hikes are sometimes too much to bear, she said. So Montero, who worked at a Hilton hotel in Orange County before being furloughed, packs up and moves.

“I’ve moved so many times, I’ve lost count,” said Montero, who is currently living with her 20-year-old daughter in a studio apartment in Fullerton. “The instability is so stressful.”

Montero is one of hundreds of thousands of renters in Orange County that grapples with how to afford the annual rent increases in a high cost of living area and eagerly looking for a solution in a new California rent control bill that could provide renters some housing stability.

Living in the time of the coronavirus pandemic, where more than 8 million people have filed for unemployment, Montero said rent control is needed now more than ever.

“Rent is getting out of control,” she said. “They [property owners/ landlords] just don’t care.”

Backed by AIDS Healthcare Foundation owner Michael Weinstein’s Housing Is A Human Right organization, Prop. 21 or the Rental Affordability Act, is a ballot initiative that would give local governments and municipalities the ability to adopt rent control on buildings that are more than 15 years old. It also would allow local government to enact rent control on condominiums, duplexes, and single-family residential homes if the property owner owns more than two homes. Additionally, municipalities could limit how much a landlord can increase rents when a rent-controlled unit goes back to the market and a new renter moves in.

Currently, local governments in the state are barred from enacting or expanding rent control under the state’s Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act of 1995. Before Costa-Hawkins, cities were allowed to enact rent control. About 15 cities in the state have grandfathered rent control provisions including Oakland, Brentwood, Beverly Hills, and Los Angeles.

This is the second time the Housing is a Human Right organization has placed a rent control measure in the state ballot. Two years ago, 60 percent of voters voted against a similar rent control initiative.

But this is a different time, Housing is a Human Right Campaign Director René Christian Moya said.

The coronavirus has made the rent control issue that much more important.

“What COVID-19 pandemic did is made this already acute housing crisis ten times worse,” Moya said. “It made already vulnerable renters, who were already paying too much, pushed them to the edge.”

Opponents of the bill say the new rent control initiative is another broken record and that any form of rent control would be counterproductive to the state’s current housing crisis.

Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a rent cap bill that prohibits landlords and property owners to hike annual rent to no more than 5 percent plus inflation and made it harder to evict tenants without just cause. AB 1482 will remain state law until 2030.

“We need to build more housing, not less,” No Prop. 21 Campaign Spokesman Steven Maviglio said. “This is the same tried and failed idea from two years ago. This bill does not build a single unit of housing.”

Maviglio said the governor and the state already addressed this issue with the passage of AB 1482 that went into effect earlier this year. A new rent control measure will do more harm than good, he said.

“This will lead to more difficulty in building new and affordable housing units, which the state desperately needs,” Maviglio said.

Still, for those residents struggling to pay bills and no relief in sight, they don’t have the luxury of waiting for more housing to be built in the future so that prices on the current housing stock goes down.

In Orange County, 43 percent of households are renters, according to the latest Census. The average rent in the county is about $1,800.

The demand for affordable housing was evident when the Irvine Community Land Trust last month opened applications for an 80-unit affordable housing apartment and received more than 6,800 applications.

“There are a few things that [are] crucial and essential in normal circumstances and are now heightened especially in a pandemic, that is putting a roof over our head and feeding our family and remaining healthy,” Orange County Democratic Chair and Unite Here Local 11 co-president Ada Briceño said. “These are things we need for a dignified life.”

Briceño oversees a union that has been severely impacted by the pandemic. Unite Here represents tens of thousands of hotels, airports, and convention workers across Southern California.

“Our members are really struggling. Of our 32,000 workers, we’re lucky if 4,000 are currently working. It’s horrific," Briceño said, adding that many of the union members are renters.

Montero, who is a Unite Here union member, said she is not the only one struggling. Many of her co-workers are in the same situation, scraping by and looking for ways to make rent. She said it is hard for her to find work given the current situation.

Although some landlords offer some type of deferment agreement to those tenants impacted by the pandemic, Montero said her landlord offers no such agreement.

"If I don't pay rent within three days of when it's due, I get charged an extra $50," she said. 

Victor Valladeras, a Huntington Beach resident and renter, said he's lived in an apartment for most of his life. Like Montero, he finds himself moving from place to place depending on how much a landlord hikes rent.

"I've been fortunate that I haven't been moving from city to city because that would be hard on me and my kids," Valladeras said. "But what we're seeing with other families is that they are doubling and tripling up and staying together because they can't afford rent."

Valladeras said he is for rent control because it could offer him a level of stability. 

"I don't want to be a renter my whole life," he said. "I want the American dream — a house with a white picket fence. But I can't do that if my rent keeps going up."