September 3, 2003

opinion

LAST MONTH, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors rejected a proposal by tenants to create an elected Rent Board, as the cities of Santa Monica and Berkeley have done. The idea of electing the San Francisco Rent Board came out of a citywide tenants' convention last March. Several hundred tenants attended it and zeroed in on the landlord-controlled Rent Board as the number-one problem facing them today. Currently, the five board commissioners are all appointed by the mayor; tenants have just two seats, while landlords and property owners get the others.

It's little wonder that the Rent Board was identified as a problem. In theory, its job is to control rents and regulate landlords; instead, it rubber-stamps rent increases and takes a laissez-faire approach to landlord regulation. More than 80 percent of the cases that come before it are decided in favor of landlords. In 2001 the Rent Board heard and approved more than 4,900 landlord petitions for rent increases – yet in the same year it did not hold a single hearing on tenant petitions claiming illegal evictions.

That pattern has lasted for years. During the peak of the dot-com years, when evictions were quadrupling from year to year, the Rent Board consistently refused to hear or investigate wrongful-eviction claims by tenants. The board's record on regulating rent increases is equally bad. In one case, a landlord was awarded $5 million in capital improvement rent increases, even though he could not provide receipts documenting the cost of the work (and even though the law requires such receipts as a condition of approval).

More than 100 tenants attended the Board of Supervisors hearing on the proposal to elect the Rent Board, all of them telling similar stories of bias, abuse, and mistreatment.

Sadly, on a Board of Supervisors that rode into office with tenant votes, only Sups. Tom Ammiano, Chris Daly, and Matt Gonzalez supported the proposal to elect the Rent Board. Other supervisors expressed fear that electing the Rent Board would be "divisive" (as if landlords and tenants got along!). Some said they feared that tenants would lose the elections, ignoring the unparalleled success tenants have had at the polls. Some feared that tenants would win the elections and make the Rent Board radically and dangerously pro-tenant.

A few people in the tenant community had similar reservations (although the proposal was backed by major tenant groups such as the Tenants Union, Tenderloin Housing Clinic, Housing Rights Committee, and St. Peter's Housing Committee). But in a nutshell, the politicians were scared of changing the status quo.

Tenants are underrepresented throughout the city on boards and commissions. Of the 11 supervisors who decided against giving tenants an elected Rent Board, all but Gonzalez are either homeowners or landlords (Jake McGoldrick rents his San Francisco flat but owns a place across the bay in Alameda).

The movement to reform the Rent Board won't go away, however. On Sept. 6, tenants will again come together for Tenant Convention II. The purpose of this second convention is to decide the next steps for Rent Board reform. Specifically, we'll be debating the pros and cons of electing the commissioners and a more moderate proposal of changing how the commissioners are appointed. Continuing the push for an elected board would mean collecting signatures to place the measure on the ballot. Reforming the appointment system, though, might be acceptable to the politicians and could be the most efficient way to go (especially when one thinks of the specter of anti-tenant/anti-rent control Gavin Newsom appointing the next Rent Board).

Whatever strategy is decided on, one thing is clear: tenants are fed up with a landlord-controlled Rent Board, and the supervisors may want to pay attention to that.