Santa Barbara City Council Adopts Rent Stabilization Ordinance in Milestone 4-3 Vote

After multiple public hearings — and several moments where it looked as if years of planning efforts might fall flat at the finish line — the Santa Barbara City Council’s four-vote majority came together to pass the long-awaited and much-debated citywide rent stabilization ordinance in a milestone 4-3 vote on Tuesday night.

While some of the of the drama spilled over from last week’s contentious hearing — when the drafted ordinance inched forward after a standoff between two of the policy’s biggest supporters, councilmembers Wendy Santamaria and Meagan Harmon, over exemptions for affordable housing — this week’s hearing served as the symbolic final stretch in what’s been a rocky road to rent stabilization.

Prior to the meeting, rumors swirled about whether the ordinance would still have the four votes it needed to earn the final seal of approval. The prolonged planning process had strained the most recent discussions, and the council majority that agreed on rent stabilization as a concept began to drift further apart as the finalized version became more complicated.

Tuesday was supposed to be an informal approval of the ordinance on the council’s consent agenda, but due to the uncertainty and split votes during the previous week, the City Council pulled the item for a deeper discussion about the final details. More specifically, councilmembers Harmon and Santamaria played another game of political poker over whether the ordinance would include exemptions requested from the city’s Housing Authority.

Councilmember Harmon said the exemptions were her red line: Without the exemptions as proposed by the city’s Housing Authority and its outgoing director Rob Fredericks, she would not vote in approval. Councilmember Santamaria worried that the exemptions would leave tenants who live in Section 8 housing without protections and was adamant that tenants should have access to the rent stabilization petition program should their deed-restricted affordable units fail habitability inspections.

The debate over the two exemptions continued during the public comment portion of the hearing, when several housing advocates and affordable housing tenants shared testimony of situations in which they said Section 8 units had failed to meet habitability requirements. Fredericks, who wrote an op-ed published in the days leading up to the hearing, pushed back on the criticism, saying that it was “just not true” that voucher holders were unable to report habitability problems to the Housing Authority.

Fredericks said the audits referenced by housing advocates presented inflated numbers, and while the Housing Authority did identify a small number of instances where it failed to provide a timely follow-up (three in 2024 and seven in 2025), those overdue cases were not based on health and safety or emergency habitability concerns.

“None of those overdue cases involved exigent health or safety deficiencies,” Fredericks said. “That does not excuse the delays, but it is relevant context.”

Councilmember Harmon supported the Housing Authority’s request to exempt Housing Authority–controlled and Section 8 deed-restricted affordable housing. She agreed with Fredericks and worried that failing to exempt affordable housing units from the rent stabilization ordinance would be counterintuitive, leading to a more limited number of Section 8 units citywide.

She cited the more than 1,500 voucher holders currently on the Section 8 waiting list and said that another layer of bureaucracy “does nothing to improve habitability,” but could disincentivize landlord participation.

“Failing to exempt these units will absolutely make it more likely that landlords don’t accept Section 8 vouchers, and as a result, the most vulnerable people in this community will be left with more of the same,” Councilmember Harmon said. “More years of 1,000-plus waiting lists, more years with nowhere near the number of Section 8 units we need.” 

Harmon acknowledged that there were units that fell through the cracks, but she said that deed-restricted units already have a higher level of oversight and inspection than any other type of units in the city. She said she wanted the ordinance to include the exemptions, and urged her fellow councilmembers not to allow the ordinance to be delayed any further.

“We have spent the last year claiming that there is a five-alarm fire of need for this ordinance,” she said. “I earnestly believe that the time is now, today.”

Councilmember Santamaria pushed back on Harmon’s claim about the potential of losing landlord participation. She argued that the 1,500-person waiting list represented those waiting for a voucher due to lack of federal funding — not voucher holders waiting for a landlord to make a unit available.

“As a landlord, you’re gonna want to take a Section 8 voucher because it’s guaranteed money from the government,” Santamaria said. “There is zero data that shows that inclusion or partial inclusion of deed-restricted affordable-housing Section 8–voucher-holding tenants is going to diminish the participation. The data shows otherwise.”

Santamaria said she was willing to allow the deed-restricted units to be exempted from the ordinance, as long as the tenants themselves would be able to have some form of recourse if they have habitability concerns that aren’t quickly addressed by the Housing Authority.

Councilmember Kristen Sneddon, who had aligned with Santamaria in nearly every step of the planning process, vented her frustration on Tuesday, saying she was “deeply disappointed” by the prospect of the ordinance being pushed down the line while the city continued to debate the minute details.

“There is a limit,” Sneddon said. “We are playing with people’s lives here.”

Sneddon said she was concerned the ordinance that was originally a “protective, bold” policy had turned into a clunky and complicated set of regulations and that it seemed that the goalposts were moved in every additional discussion.

“I’m deeply disappointed that this comes down to an argument about one very specific form of exemption,” Sneddon said. “Yes, we want to protect all vulnerable tenants — every one in the city — but if we don’t have this passed at all, if this doesn’t even exist at all, not a single person is covered…. Please, I am imploring us not to gamble with people’s lives by not having this in place at all.”

After an exhausting set of questions for city staff and the city attorney’s office, Santamaria and Harmon came to a version they could both support: the ordinance would be passed as recommended by staff, with the two exemptions for affordable housing, and the city would direct staff to pursue a pathway for tenants to address habitability concerns through the upcoming “just cause” amendments, which will be updated to align with the new citywide rent cap.

The compromise was enough to secure the four votes necessary to get the ordinance adopted on schedule for the January 2027 launch date. Councilmember Sneddon joined in the vote with Santamaria, Harmon, and Oscar Gutierrez, who remained silent during the hearing but stayed consistent with his previous support of the rent cap.

Mayor Randy Rowse and councilmembers Mike Jordan and Eric Friedman voted in opposition. Friedman, who is running for mayor against Sneddon, said that he is concerned that the stricter rent cap will diminish the overall supply of housing while increasing rent rates overall. 

Friedman also worried about how the city will pay for the potentially $2 million to $2.5 million price tag, which would be mostly covered by rent registry fees but would potentially require hundreds of thousands of dollars from the city budget.

“I don’t hear any conversations about how we are going to pay for this,” Friedman said.

The approval also included a plan to appropriate $500,000 from the city’s flexible housing fund to pay for implementation and a fee study to decide the costs for the rental registry. Once in place, the citywide rent cap will be set at 60 percent of the Consumer Price Index or 3 percent, whichever is lower, for units built prior to 1995.

While the approval marks a major accomplishment for the supporters of a rent cap, there is a distinct possibility that property owners will file a referendum, potentially sending the issue to a ballot in 2027 alongside a similar referendum to reopen State Street to vehicles.