Sacremento housing costs increasing - lets use our succesful SF playbook to solve the problem
Rents in the city have risen 45% in the past seven years. This vaulted the city from the 45th most expensive metro area to the 11th. Fortunately, Sacramento tenant advocates aggressively responded to the crisis by collecting 44,000 signatures to qualify a rent control and just cause eviction measure for the March 2020 ballot. This led the City Council to make a deal whereby the ordinance campaign would be dropped in exchange for the Council passing its own just rent control and just cause eviction law. The big difference is that the Council’s law limits annual rent increases to 6 percent plus inflation (which will likely mean a total of roughly 9% in the next year) while the ballot measure capped rent hikes at 5%. To give some perspective, a ballot measure I co-authored in San Francisco in 1992 limits rent increases to 60% of inflation. San Francisco tenants have typically paid only 1-2% rent hikes since our Prop H initiative passed (I discuss the Prop H campaign in The Activist’s Handbook). Sacramento tenants will likely pay almost four times higher annual rent increases than those in San Francisco. But San Francisco rent control started with a 7% annual increase