Santa Rosa City Council ill-advisedly votes for rent control

No doubt 'Feelin' the Bern' of late, the Santa Rosa City Council this month passed an ill-advised resolution mandating selective rent control and citywide 'just cause' eviction standards.

Unlike Berkeley and the People's Republic of Santa Monica, however, Santa Rosa has historically honored its Midwestern roots by infusing a healthy dose of skepticism in considering such radical measures.

This issue should be no different. So let's consider the facts.

FACT 1

Penalizing landlords — largely local mom-and-pops who have the misfortune of owning pre-1996 apartment units — with price controls will do nothing at all to help those who can't afford to live here. The council majority's version of rent control is a shotgun approach that might benefit a handful of SRJC students, but so too will it needlessly assist the soon-to-be-ex-spouses booted out of their ridgetop homes in Fountaingrove awaiting the divorce to become final.

FACT 2

SRJC student housing issues will be solved only by building on-campus housing. And guess what? A coalition of 'saintly' housing advocates and 'evil' businesspeople is already pushing for such a solution. Stay tuned.

Not one affordable housing project — from Burbank's plethora of offerings to the SAY Dream Center — has ever been built here without the active support of such 'evil' businesspeople. So isn't it time we all chuck such clichés?

FACT 3

Citywide 'just cause' evictions is nothing more than 'just an excuse' for either clogging up the already-deluged court system (to the benefit of law firms such as ours, by the way) or creating a new $4 million city bureaucracy that will benefit nobody else but the SEIU union members who were among the rent control vote's most visible supporters. Surprise, surprise.

FACT 4

Any time in the next few pre-election months you hear any one of the four City Council majority members professing to be 'pro-business,' please feel free to laugh out loud.

Because rent control is the one economic concept which even liberal economist Paul Krugman emphasizes simply does not work. Never. Ever. So shame on you, council members who know better. You know who you are. And so does the business community.

FACT 5

After years of senseless battling on the City Council between the 'environmentalist/smart growth' folks, on the one hand, and the 'business/pro-growth' people, on the other, it finally seemed with the hiring of our dynamic new city manager that we'd come to our senses and started to act like adults, getting the important things done that we could agree on.

A 7-0 vote on Courthouse Square reunification — who'da thunk it? Even though other reasonable people might have disagreed, in that unanimous vote our City Council proclaimed a decisive consensus of vision.

But now, ram-rodding this pre-election rent control red herring through on a razor-thin 4-3 vote virtually guarantees that we are headed once again into another senseless cycle of ballot initiatives, ad hominem robo-calls, and lawsuits.

When that all comes down, current City Council majority members, you only have yourselves to blame. And that's a fact.

Kevin Konicek is a partner at Zyromski Konicek LLP in downtown Santa Rosa, specializing in civil law and business litigation.

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