The Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance Tuesday to amend a County Code chapter regarding just cause for residential eviction, adding mandates requiring landlords to offer tenants a one-year residential lease, and requiring tenants to be invited back to a rental unit after vacating as a result of a notice for no-fault termination of tenancy.
The right of first refusal to re-lease, requiring former tenants to be invited back to a rental unit after vacating as a result of a notice for no-fault termination of tenancy, applies to cases in which a landlord takes a unit off-market, such as for “substantial remodels,” or for owner or family move-in.
The ordinance also clarifies the definition of “substantial remodel” — a reason on which landlords often can rely to evict a tenant — stating that it is not for cosmetic improvements, but must only be for “the primary purpose of bringing the rental unit into compliance with applicable health and safety codes.”
Those requirements apply to multifamily units and do not apply to single-family homes with fewer than two units.
The ordinance comes as a result of Isla Vista “renovictions” — in which hundreds of tenants living in CBC & The Sweeps apartments received eviction notices after Chicago-based Core Spaces purchased the apartment buildings with plans to renovate the buildings, evicting all residents while work is being done.
“I think it’s our duty as the board to think about the balance of housing that we have in our county and our community, and clearly where we need housing is low- and moderate-income housing,” Supervisor Joan Hartmann said.
County staff said the rental vacancy rate across the county is less than 2% and, according to California Housing Partnership research, 2,050 naturally occurring affordable housing units in the county — unsubsidized multifamily rental properties where, because of a combination of location and condition of the building, rents are affordable to low-income households — are at risk of being lost in the next two years, likely because of “renovictions.”
“As the desperation of Santa Barbara’s working class grows — I would just be honest — my desperation grows because I feel like we need to go to bat for these people,” Supervisor Das Williams said.
Some public commenters — as well as Supervisors Bob Nelson and Steve Lavagnino, who both voted against the ordinance — expressed concerns that the requirements could discourage people from investing in properties, leading to less available units.
“There is definitely a balance — trying to find a balance between the landlord and the tenant — and it already is, because one has resources and the other one doesn’t, it’s always going to be skewed to the landlord,” Lavagnino said. “But the more we’re trying to put our thumb on the scale, I think we’re going to get to the point where fewer people are going to want to get involved in that business. The fewer people that get involved in that business, the fewer units there will be in the future, driving up the prices of the limited stock that’s available still.”
Supervisor Williams said the current situation — that of hundreds of people being evicted into a market of very little affordable housing — does not allow the supervisors in the South County to act with that caution.
“I also would prefer to act with restraint so we do not create too much of a disincentive to production, but I do not believe the requirement to offer a 12-month lease and the requirement to allow folks to return to their rental unit constitutes that,” Williams said. “I just don’t think this is an extreme ordinance. I think this is a reasonable response to the conditions at hand.”
According to the item’s board letter, the ordinance is set to be effective on Aug. 11, following a second reading by the Board of Supervisors on July 11.