With rents skyrocketing around the city, community groups are looking for a means to eradicate slumlords and implement programs to protect renters’ rights.
Since 2013, Housing Long Beach, a nonprofit organization led by Executive Director Josh Butler, has been pushing for a Rental Escrow Account Program (REAP) like Los Angeles implemented in 1988.
Elaine Hutchison, right, and Joani Weir have teamed up to create an action committee in Long Beach to fight for the rights of property owners. The committee claims that Josh Butler, executive director of Housing Long Beach, has “launched an attack” on property owners’ rights. (Photo by the Business Journal’s Larry Duncan)
In L.A., if a property owner is found to provide tenants with substandard living conditions, the property is placed in REAP and tenants may pay a reduced rent into a city-managed escrow account until inspectors determine the violations have been corrected.
Last year, instead of REAP, the Long Beach City Council voted unanimously to enact the Proactive Rental Housing Inspection Program (PRHIP) to “safeguard the stock of decent, safe and sanitary rental housing” in the city through mandatory periodic inspections of rental properties.
While Butler acknowledged that PRHIP was a good starting point, he does not feel that it does enough to ensure renters’ rights and still advocates for REAP, as well as just-cause eviction laws, to come to Long Beach.
“REAP is something we’ve been working on up to the middle of last year when the city council elected to adopt the PRHIP,” Butler said. “We took a step back from asking for our REAP ordinance, but I still think we should be taking punitive measures against slumlords, and I’m not sure why anyone who’s not a slumlord wouldn’t want to defend an ordinance that is specifically going after slumlords, which is a very small number of landlords in Long Beach.”
His persistent push for these programs has recently drawn the attention of property owners and managers in the city.
Elaine Hutchison, president of Long Beach-based property management company Paragon Equities, and Long Beach private property owner Joani Weir have joined together in creating an action committee to “fight for property owners’ rights” and to “stop rent control.”
The committee held its first meeting on Sunday, July 17. Weir said they only expected around 25 people to attend, but more than 50 showed up. Those in attendance included property owners, real estate agents, tenants and Kathy Jurado, a member of the League of United Latin American Citizens, who spoke during the meeting.
In an e-mail invitation to members of the community to attend its meeting, the committee accused Butler of launching “a campaign against property owners that includes rent control and REAP for Long Beach.”
According to Butler, Housing Long Beach’s primary concern is the availability of livable, affordable housing and keeping residents occupying units, but Hutchison says programs such as REAP actually make housing less affordable.
“The city has a history of affordable housing, but when you look at major cities that have all these programs, what you find is the rents are very high,” Hutchison said.
For example, Hutchison said median monthly rent is $4,850 in San Francisco, $2,670 in San Jose, $2,630 in Los Angeles and $2,250 in Seattle. While accurate, these numbers only account for median rent of two-bedroom apartments, according to apartmentlist.com, which had identical numbers for two-bedroom units, except for San Francisco which is listed at $4,650 per month. Median rent for one-bedroom units in those same cities is $500 to $1,200 less.
Apartmentlist.com listed 100 major cities’ median rents and yearly rent increases, showing median rent in Long Beach has increased 8% from July of last year, second only to Colorado Springs which grew 9%. According to the site, as of July, Long Beach renters can expect the median rents of $1,430 for a one-bedroom unit and $1,950 for a two-bedroom unit – or about $700 less than Los Angeles.
However, regardless of median rent, Butler said that REAP is designed to catch the small percentage of property owners who have pushed the envelope of substandard living conditions. He said, “There are landlords that would like to use the system to continue to operate a business plan based on a lack of investment in their properties – a business plan of displacement. We see that. We know those conditions exist – not only here in Long Beach but nationwide.”
But Hutchison and Weir argue that programs such as REAP and just-cause eviction would have an extremely negative impact on private property owners around the city, which would result in a decline in affordable housing.
“Long Beach is the most affordable beach community in California, and you have to ask why,” Hutchison said. “The city certainly isn’t building affordable housing. In the past they have had programs that were designed to do affordable housing, but that hasn’t really happened. The affordable housing that we have is provided by the private owners. So we are at a loss to explain why any of these programs would improve the situation we have right now, which is affordable housing.”
According to Weir, another concern the committee has regarding REAP is that it is in the tenants’ and city’s best interests to keep a property in REAP and not allow violations to be fixed. This is because tenants can enjoy a reduced rent as long as the property is not brought back up to code and the city receives administrative fees as long as the property is in REAP.
Weir described her first encounter with REAP, involving a friend who was a property owner in Echo Park. Belissa Cohen, a former L.A. Dee Da columnist for L.A. Weekly, lost her three-unit rental property after it was placed in REAP, and though she met with numerous consultants and did her best to fix what the city deemed violations, she was never able to get her property out of REAP. She was forced to list the property as a short sale, which also cost her another property that she had mortgaged to purchase the Echo Park location.
Weir claims that the L.A. Building and Safety Department, code enforcement and the housing department utilized “unfair practices under the guise of REAP” to keep Cohen’s property in REAP until she lost it.
Both Hutchison and Weir feel that, aside from their negative view of REAP, the city already has a similar program in PRHIP: an inspection requirement to ensure suitable living conditions. But Hutchison said that inspections can oftentimes be subjective, and standards are not clear about what gets written up and what doesn’t.
However, while it is true that some inspectors may be stricter than others, the PRHIP ordinance in section 18.30.010, subsection D, states that the standards property owners must meet are those of the state that would fall under California Health and Safety Code section 17920-17928, which defines “substandard living conditions.” A lack of hot and cold running water, insect or rodent infestation, mold and structure dilapidation are some of the substandard living conditions set forth by the state, which PRHIP is meant to uphold.
Butler said, “Usually we are talking about extremely substandard conditions. There are places that councilmembers said they could hardly breathe inside the building. That’s one thing that does not come across in pictures.” Butler was referring to Housing Long Beach taking several councilmembers to visit “slum properties.”
Another of the committee’s PRHIP concerns, according to Weir, is the violation of landlords’ and tenants’ rights through forced inspection of every unit in a building. Weir claims that this would impact the undocumented community the most, as personal identification is asked for upon inspection of units.
“That could open up human rights violations if someone does not want their unit inspected and they don’t want to give their name and phone number,” Weir said. “That can be a very uncomfortable experience for the tenants. The spirit of PRHIP was to protect them, not get their personal identification and go into their unit if they do not want you in the unit.”
In the section of the ordinance regarding inspections (18.30.120, subsection C), however, it states that only 10% of units and garages will be inspected periodically. If during those inspections the inspector determines one or more violations exist, they may inspect additional units up to 100% on the property. So, while it is possible that all units may be inspected, it is not the norm.
Though the committee does not agree with PRHIP, it understands that the program is here to stay for now. Regarding Housing Long Beach still pushing for full REAP, Hutchison said, “Let’s give PRHIP a chance to work. Let’s see if that can work first before we jump into something that’s onerous and will perhaps not solve the problem either.”
Hutchison explained that through PRHIP if an owner has a code violation on their property and does not correct that violation in a timely manner, they would go before the city prosecutor in court. “So there’s nothing more that we need that we don’t already have in PRHIP, and we won’t accept it.”
Just-cause eviction is the other major change Butler and Housing Long Beach are urging the city to adopt. As it stands in Long Beach, renters can be evicted without cause. If a landlord suspects a renter is engaging in illegal activity but cannot prove it, they can be evicted. Butler calls these practices into question because they can be abused by landlords who can and will evict tenants simply because they don’t like them or something they have said.
Butler told the story of Consuelo Quintana, a Long Beach resident who was evicted from her apartment after 41 years for telling two younger tenants that she would not go out and do laundry at night because there had been shootings in the area. The young tenants complained to the landlord who then evicted Quintana.
“I think there’s been a lot of displacement in Downtown Long Beach, and I think a lot of it has gone very quietly,” Butler said. “We think the changes that are happening in Downtown Long Beach are great, but we have to figure out how to make those changes without making them on the backs of our residents.
“We have 58% of the community who rent, and we think those renters should be protected from unwarranted evictions,” Butler continued. “We have low-income people of color who are a big part of the Long Beach story. We boast about our diversity, but right now we are at risk of losing that diversity. It’s low-income communities of color who are paying higher percentages of their income and who are getting caught in that vicious cycle of being continuously behind on everything.”
Weir, on the other hand, claims that just-cause eviction is utilized merely as a rebranded form of rent control in cities like Boston where it already exists. She said the program is a catalyst for rent control to be implemented in a city because one cannot exist for long without the other.
Hutchison continued, saying, “A lot of people don’t recognize that REAP and just-cause eviction are the sidelines, the buddies, of rent control, but they are and they will have the same effect. Any city that’s brought in just-cause eviction says that you have to have specific reasons why you would be able to move a tenant out, and they can sue you and all kinds of things. I think it’s Josh’s way to ensure that he gets rent control – to get these [programs] in first and then he can build on them.”
Several U.S. cities, including San Diego, have approved just-cause eviction laws without also enacting rent control policies, but Weir claims it is still a form of rent control in and of itself. She said, “I think a mediation process with difficult obstacles [for landlords] equals rent control.”
Aside from all their concerns, Hutchison and Weir echo Butler’s statement that the number of undesirable landlords in the City of Long Beach is very low. Hutchison recalled a council meeting several months ago when 1st District Councilmember Lena Gonzalez asked Long Beach Development Services Director Amy Bodek how many owners would be considered undesirable, to which Bodek answered nine.
Weir said that she has cleaned up 19 buildings in Long Beach since 1999, and that if one woman could do that, Bodek should be able to rid the city of nine slumlords utilizing her staff and city resources.
“I would love to sit with Amy and show her my techniques if she doesn’t know them,” Weir said. “Because with all that staff that she has, I’m sure she could take care of those issues with the nine landlords that are undesirable to Long Beach very quickly, without implementing programs that are going to chase people out of [the city].”
She continued by offering the same courtesy to Butler, adding, “I don’t think Josh has cleaned up 19 buildings. I would welcome him to spend a year with me and see how the real world works on those properties.”
Weir said she has met with Butler before and explained these concerns to him, but that he has been indoctrinated and isn’t looking at the long-term consequences. She said he is dividing landlords and tenants by utilizing social media, mainstream media, intimidation, litigation, petitions and protests with professional protestors which is a mistake and dishonest.
In a 9.5-minute video produced by Weir, many claims are made against Butler. Slides appear saying Butler is “intentionally inflaming our community with half-truth stories that are unjust and biased against landlords, using social issues such as race, gender equality, homelessness and the LGBT community to further his special interest agendas” and that “Josh and Housing Long Beach are using these social elements to give them political power. This is inauthentic.”
Hutchison added, “I think he’s very short-sighted. He only sees the euphoria and the ego of the people that are following him at the moment. What we are is a broad-based community organization that is getting together to deal with these issues and to provide more accurate information because I think that’s what’s not out there. People don’t really have the knowledge and the understanding. That’s our purpose and we are here to stay.”