WESTWOOD, Calif. — As a social epidemiologist at UCLA, Kathryn Leifheit focuses much of her research on how insecure and unaffordable housing affects people’s health, especially children, but this past summer, that research hit home… literally.
“My landlord was proposing to raise our rent by 20%,” Leifheit said.
Except there was one small problem. Leifheit lives in a rent-controlled apartment.
“In Santa Monica, you can only raise the rent by 6% this year,” she said.
Leifheit tried speaking to her landlord with no luck, so she eventually got the city involved.
“I believe the rent control board for Santa Monica also sent a letter kind of explaining what the right number should be and ultimately, we got there.”
But the entire process taught her just how complicated rental rules can be.
“There’s a ton of variation based not only on where you live but things like the age of your building, and I figure that if it was confusing for me, it has to be confusing for a lot of tenants in the area,” she said.
So, Leifheit created a rent mapping tool to show the maximum rent hikes allowed under city, county, and state rent control regulations.
“These areas in red are places where rent increases are allowed,” she said, pointing to the map.
The darker the color, the greater the possible hike. The darkest red represents areas without rent control ordinances. If an area is not rent controlled, the statewide maximum increase is 10% unless you live in a detached single-family home or your building is less than 15 years old.
LA residents can look up whether their unit is rent-controlled by going to zimas.lacity.org and clicking under the housing section.
“Rents have been sort of depressed related to the pandemic for a couple of years. I figure now might be a moment where a lot of landlords are trying to do these big rent hikes,” Leifheit said.
According to the city of Santa Monica, there were 12 excess rent complaints filed in 2021. That’s the lowest number in the last 10 years and the majority were resolved through some kind of mediation process.
Overall, tenant advocates say there needs to be more oversight. They argue right now, if a landlord raises rent illegally, the rules aren’t enforced unless there’s a complaint, and that puts the responsibility on the renter. Instead, they’d like to see a statewide rental registry, something California Assembly member Buffy Wicks has tried to pass four times, but landlords cite concerns over privacy and increased costs.
“When we know more about what renters are experiencing, when we know about statewide eviction data across the state, we can predict trends we might be seeing in our communities. We can make more sound public policy. Our journalists can investigate more easily,” Wicks said.
She said California is home to some of the lowest homeownership rates in the country and, unlike housing data, rental data has been proprietary and therefore, much more difficult for the public to access.
“We did a bill a couple of years ago, AB 1482, that was an anti-rent gouging bill, and we really didn’t have a good sense of where to put the parameters in terms of how much landlords could increase their rents per year because we didn’t have the data to understand where the market actually is,” she said.
Leiftheit said with a registry, they’d have to log the current rent they’re charging as well as any additional increases and then cities could check those increases to make sure they’re legal and do some proactive enforcement. For now, though, she hopes her online tool will help more renters arm themselves with critical information to keep them in their homes.
“If you don’t have a stable roof over your head, if you don’t know where you’re going to sleep at night, then everything else can fall apart,” she said.
Making it even tougher to pick up the pieces.
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