Avoiding the Corporate Landlord

In recent years, and in direct response to the rising costs of housing across California, there have been calls to pass legislation intended to improve access to affordable housing across the state. Here in Santa Barbara, these efforts have been galvanized by highly publicized mass evictions of working-class families forced out so that the buildings they were living in could be converted to luxury apartments, condominiums, and similar housing. Often, these evictions were performed by large out-of-town property management corporations who seemed to have little if any interest in the long-term welfare of our city.

Marginalized in this debate about property rights are the voices of small “mom and pop” landlords — owners and property managers who live in Santa Barbara and manage 10 or fewer properties in the area. These landlords are the ones often caught in the crossfire between efforts to regulate the more callous actions of the large corporate property managers, and the righteous outrage of the tenant activist groups seeking to protect renters through the passage of just cause eviction rules, rent control, and similar tenant-focused legislation.

While these new regulations are intended to protect tenants and to prevent the excesses of unscrupulous corporate property managers, there is deep and growing concern among mom-and-pop landlords that these regulations will themselves be counterproductive toward their stated goal of ensuring access to affordable housing. They foresee that these regulations will increase costs, reduce the agency of landlords in selecting tenants, and put a hard cap on rental incomes.