The Carpinteria City Council on Monday passed an emergency ordinance that prevents converting apartment buildings into cooperatives.
The vote was 4-0, with Councilman Brad Stein absent.
“The concern has to do with protecting apartment housing in Carpinteria,” Carpinteria City Manager Dave Durflinger said during the meeting.
“We live in an area where there are high real estate values and an interest in converting apartments.”
The owner of an apartment building in Carpinteria recently converted the complex into a cooperative apartment, resulting in the loss of 36 units from the city’s rental housing stock, Durflinger said.
Unlike a condo, people buy a portion of a co-op and become a shareholder; the person is then entitled to use a specific unit within the property.
The ordinance states that applications for conversions shall not be accepted when the vacancy factor for available apartment units in the city is less than 5 percent.
The conversion to a cooperative apartment creates the same impacts to tenants and the community that are caused by conversions to condominiums, Durflinger said.
The emergency ordinance states: “The conversion of the city’s existing rental units to condominiums, community apartments, stock cooperatives, and cooperative apartments can result in the displacement of low and moderate income households.”
Availability and affordability of housing are already very low in the city, making it extremely challenging for renters to find available housing, and for business owners to successfully recruit and retain employees, the ordinance states.
The Carpinteria ordinance goes into effect immediately and will only apply to conversions of five or more units, according to the city.
— Noozhawk staff writer Joshua Molina can be reached at jmolina@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.
