Housing discrimination crackdown + Rent control 2020 + Child care union rally
Good Wednesday morning to you, readers. I celebrated my one-year anniversary with The Bee yesterday, and what a great 365 days it’s been!
SHAME, SACRAMENTO
Los Angeles Democrat and state Sen. Holly Mitchell handed a victory to California tenants last year via a law she wrote to ban discrimination against tenants who use housing vouchers to pay their rent.
Current law already bans landlords from discriminating against a tenant based on his or her source of income. But landlords have to be willing to rent a unit to a family or individual using a voucher. If accepted, the tenant’s program directly pays the landlord what the voucher covers, and the renter pays the rest.
Mitchell’s law expanded that protection dramatically, amid a statewide housing affordability crisis that’s pushed more and more Californians out of their homes and into other communities or states.
But a recent Sacramento Bee analysis found in the area more than 60 advertisements for Sacramento-area rents online last month that said “no Section 8,” referring to the former name for the federal Housing Choice Voucher Program.
Reporter Theresa Clift’s investigation caught the attention of the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing, which selected Sacramento County as the first to launch an enforcement action to crack down on landlords who illegally post advertisements that say they do no accept potential tenants with Section 8 vouchers.
An estimated 300,000 low-income Californians rely on state and federal housing vouchers to avoid homelessness and deep poverty, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Countywide, about 13,200 people have vouchers, according to the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency, which administers the program locally. The last time the waiting list opened two years ago, 43,000 people applied, and 7,000 were placed on the waiting list.
Read more from Clift here.
LA VIE BOHEME
Sorry, but every time I think of rent control, I get songs from “Rent” stuck in my head.
Rent control is headed back to the November ballot, just two years after California voters soundly rejected a similar initiative.
The Secretary of State’s office announced on Monday it had reviewed and validated a sample of the nearly 1 million signatures submitted in December to qualify the initiative. The measure only needed 623,212 signatures, 5 percent of the votes for governor in 2018.
The initiative takes aim at the 25-year-old Costa Hawkins Rental Act, which limits the ability of local governments to establish rent control in buildings constructed after 1995 and in single-family homes and condos. While some cities have established certain rent restrictions, including in Sacramento, the current law is considered an obstacle to stronger protections.
Expect it to be an expensive battle. The 2018 campaign totaled more than $100 million, a bulk of it raised by opposition groups representing realtors and landlords.
The supporters, led by Michael Weinstein of AIDS Healthcare Foundation, will have to convince some of the of voters who rejected rent control in November 2018 that California is ready for more expansive tenant protections.
“The housing affordability and homelessness crises are the most pressing social justice and public health emergencies in our time, especially in Southern California,” Weinstein said in December. “We must take action to stop it now.”
Not to mention, they still face stiff competition from a coalition comprised largely of those against the 2018 proposal.
The State Building Trades Council pledged on Monday to fight the new initiative.
“This initiative, disguised as a solution to these problems, will interfere with historic renter protections and block the path towards future investment in the construction of affordable housing units for the working class,” said Cesar Diaz, the council’s legislative and political director. “The ballot measure is a distraction aimed at delaying important advances in protecting renters and building housing to alleviate the crisis impacting our working families. We will work hard to ensure its defeat in November.”
You can read more about the 2020 proposal here.
‘REWRITE THE RULES’
Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon is joining child care workers for a rally today at the Capitol before the workers deliver at least 8,000 union cards to qualify for an election.
“The effort to organize California child care providers is the largest union organizing campaign in the nation in the last decade, and one of the most visible examples of workers demanding politicians rewrite the rules so more workers have access to unions,” a press release for the event said.
Assemblywoman Monique Limón, D-Goleta, paved the way for some 40,000 childcare workers to unionize and collectively bargain with the state last year through her Assembly Bill 378.
The rally is scheduled to begin at 11 a.m. on the west steps.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“We’ve had NIMBY after NIMBY say no we don’t want this in our neighborhood. We’ve had the tools to do something and we’ve turned the other way. We don’t want to give handouts, we want to give hand ups. We don’t want to give too much because that makes them lazy.”
- Assemblywoman Sharon Quirk-Silva, D-Fullerton, yesterday during a Rising Tide Summit on Economic Security panel to address homelessness.
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