Tenants who are evicted for a renovation will have the right to return to their homes at no more than a 10% increase in rent, the Santa Barbara City Council decided Tuesday.

The vote was 4-2, with council members Oscar Gutierrez, Meagan Harmon, Wendy Santamaria and Kristen Sneddon voting in support. Mayor Randy Rowse and Councilman Mike Jordan opposed the ordinance. Councilman Eric Friedman was absent.

The vote was a crowning achievement for Santamaria, elected last November and who campaigned on the issue of tenant rights.

“I am on the side of our constituents. I am on the side of the folks that keep our city running,” she said. “There is literally no reason to delay. There are people’s lives, not just money, at risk here.”

Santamaria, who at 26 is the youngest council member in city history, made the vote possible when she was elected. She ousted former District 1 Councilwoman Alejandra Gutierrez, who had opposed the ordinance. Santamaria said it was her job to represent people’s lives and safety.

“We talk a lot about things like public safety and these other things that are important to our city, and they should be, but public safety also means having a home,” Santamaria said. “Once you have a surgery, having somewhere to rest. Having a home to retire in.”

Landlords and property owners said the ordinance was misguided. Property owners won’t want to invest in their properties and make them nice if they aren’t allowed to increase the rent more than 10%, they contended. Passing the ordinance, they said, would lead to neglect of properties.

Realtor Samantha Ireland opposed the ordinance. She said it would discourage investment in buildings.

“If a tenant has a guaranteed right to return after substantial renovations at a fixed or below-market level, it discourages landlords from making necessary upgrades,” Ireland said. “Many renovations improve safety, habitability and long-term value, but if owners are forced to bring back the same tenant at nearly the same rate, there’s little financial incentive to undertake the costly projects.”

She said that could result in the older housing stock deteriorating.

The ordinance also calls for a licensed construction expert to verify that the work cannot be reasonably accomplished in a safe manner with the tenant in place and that the proposed work requires the tenant to vacate the unit for at least 30 consecutive days. In addition, property owners would have to wait at least a year before evicting tenants if they purchase a property.

Rowse said he was offended by the suggestion that he is not pro-tenant. He said he supports tenants as much as anyone else on the council. A former small-business owner, he said he was always concerned about his employees. He believes building more housing is the answer, not capping rents for existing housing.

“The attempts at trying to tweak a market, the attempts at trying to keep the thumb on the scale of the market on one side or the other almost never work, whether it’s a wage floor, price control, a tobacco subsidy, tariffs for God’s sake — it always has unintended consequences,” Rowse said. “These unintended consequences have worked out historically all over the world in reducing the supply of available rental housing.”

Renter Corina Svacina urged the council to stand on the side of tenants.

“You all now have the opportunity to be on the side of mom-and-pops, the people who make up this town by living and working in this community,” Svacina said. “The multimillionaire developers here, they are not the mom-and-pops. They are buying buildings worth tens of millions of dollars, and they are behind the demise of Santa Barbara’s housing.”

Renter Hannah Cohen said that people are forced to rent long term because the cost to buy a home is so high.

“Forcing families to uproot their lives and come back to a massive rent hike is completely unreasonable,” Cohen said. “I am calling on you to protect our community.”

According to Assistant City Attorney Dan Hentschke, the ordinance would not apply to units built within the past 15 years, owner-occupied single-family residents renting less than or equal to two units, housing shared with an owner, duplex units where the owner lives in a unit, hotels, dorms and low-income housing. The single-family homes would not be exempt if they are owned by an LLC or corporation.

Harmon, who is in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates for work, stayed through the meeting even though it started at 4 a.m. for her. She said the ordinance change simply closes a loophole, but that loophole has an “outsized effect on the community.”

“When we talk about unjust eviction, of which renoviction is clearly one, it has such a destabilizing effect on anyone who experiences it,” Harmon said. “The most vulnerable in our community are depending on us.”