The Landlord You Want

Dear Honorable Mayor and City Council Members,

I have rentals in the City of Santa Barbara. Most are single family residences, and I also have some apartments downtown.

Most of my homes and apartments house Housing Authority (HA) clients with the houses for larger families and especially pets who need yards. The studios downtown are liked by HA as well as Good Samaritan, Peoples Self-Help Housing, and recently New Beginnings, a program focused on car dwellers. Our Housing Authority I consider one of the finest in the country, and there are no better people doing a better job to be found. They are a pleasure to work with.

One of my tenants, a young man, entered a studio in the mid ’90s at $675 a month and walked five blocks to work as a baker at Our Daily Bread … for 15 years. He met a girl, moved, and his rent was then $850. Those units were in the $1,400 range by then. Rent increases were less needed years back when expenses were less volatile.

I am offended by this 60 percent government intervention “Cap to Consumer Price Index” being proposed by councilmembers Santamaria and Sneddon. To be blunt, I won’t do it, and I’ll explain.

If I quit and sell, it will take 400 new developed units to set aside 10 percent of their units to regain our units. None of the new units will have yards for pets or be the gorgeous 1930s houses we have loved owning here in Santa Barbara. At new mortgage and tax rates, these houses will not become rentals again; they will be lived in by the rich that Santamaria and Sneddon refer to as villains in their proposal.

The Rich. We can still see earlier times in the railroad sidecar down at our train station. That early example of the rich evokes how they came for stays in Santa Barbara using railcars like we do RVs now. Santa Barbara is cursed with the interest of the rich by its natural beauty, according to Santamaria and Sneddon. Yet Santa Barbara government caters to attract the wealthy with its tourist industry. And this has always been present. The workforce housing works for the rich, does it not? And don’t we all at varying levels?

Costs. Insurance was $325 a house when I started. Until recently this averaged $795, but in the last 18-24 months it has doubled to $1,400. Some houses classed into flood zones have more costs.

SLIP Program. Dale over at Public Works and I might start exchanging Christmas cards, we have done so much work together! Santa Barbara is reviewing the sewer lines and requiring sewer laterals be replaced on these old, original homes — the Sewer Lateral Inspection Program. This was $6,500 back in 2016; now at $22,000 on Victoria Street this fall.

Property Taxes. We send in about $160k a year in local property taxes.

Utility costs pace ahead of the national average (currently $171.21) and have embarrassingly increased in California with the Clean Energy over the last 20 years. Santa Barbara shows a $55 million budget for Clean Energy. S.B. County contributes 0.000016 to the global plant food tally. That is 16 one hundred thousandths of one percent, but this is apriority position over the housing crisis locally.

Older housing stock requires more maintenance, more costly than new. Mine date between 1896 and 1936, except we have an outlier on the Mesa from 1978. Older homes never become fully new again. Local codes on remodeling, with standards implying Alaska and not our Southern Savannah, has Global Warming adding costs yet again.

Unintended Consequences

Two years ago Proposition 33 attempted California vacancy control. The response throughout the state had rents increased by every landlord who was paying attention. Landlords bolstered rent levels in case Prop 33 passed and froze things. Prop 33 failed but the Unintended Consequences were in, possibly up to 15 percent statewide. When you freeze or limit rents, it freezes property values and disincentivizes the industry.

There’s a dysfunction around successfully enticing the wealthy and having this vibrant economy and city, and then not addressing the problems that economy causes with the revenue it produces. Assigning that money to other reasons and agendas and then blaming others is not an honest approach to the problem itself, the wealthy and their role, or to the landlords to whom you are assigning blame.

Please vote against this ironic approach to solving workforce housing, itself an Unintended Consequence of successful tourism. Of the 15,000 rentals in Santa Barbara you will have 15,000 annual applications for higher reimbursement, appeals, and more, to offset costs in expensive Santa Barbara.

This Santamaria/Sneddon Proposal is chasing a ball into the street and will not produce the intended results, but will end in Unintended Consequences.

Let me give an example: In the movie Shane, the homeowner tells Shane to leave and directs a gun on him. Shane quietly asks the man to put the gun down and simply to ask him to leave. The perplexed homeowner asks, what’s the difference. Shane responds saying, “I’d just like it to be my idea.”

We think we are already the landlord you want, but it was our idea and we want to still own that. Not all landlords are alike, nor are all cities and their needs. We are offended by being included in this Proposal.