After months of passionate debate, split votes and lengthy meetings, the Santa Barbara City Council will be reviewing the draft rent stabilization ordinance on Tuesday.
The proposed ordinance limits how much landlords can raise rents, creates a rental property registry, and forms a rent stabilization board to oversee the program.
The council voted on policy components of the ordinance in April, including to limit rent increases to one time within a 12-month period at 60% of Consumer Price Index (CPI), with a maximum of 3%, whichever is lower.
Landlords can petition to increase the rent higher than that if they made a major repair or improvement to the unit. Tenants can petition to lower rent due to habitability issues, reduced housing services, or if a landlord charges more rent than what is legally allowed, according to the city staff report.
The petition process for landlords and tenants includes a review by a hearing officer, whose decision can be appealed to the rent stabilization board.
The ordinance wouldn’t apply to units built after Feb. 1, 1995; single family homes; condos and townhomes; owner-occupied duplexes; mobile home parks; government owned and operated units; or deed restricted affordable housing.
If approved, the ordinance would go into effect Jan. 1, 2027.
The Santa Barbara City Council will be discussing the draft ordinance on Tuesday, with an expected start time of 5 p.m.
Comments can be made in person during the meeting at City Hall, 735 Anacapa St., or emailed to Clerk@SantaBarbaraCA.gov before the start of Tuesday’s meeting.
Draft Ordinance Details
A city employee will be designated to lead the day-to-day administration of the rent stabilization program. They will operate the rental registry, deal with exemption claims, and implement new regulations, according to the staff report.
The rent stabilization board is proposed to be a board of seven people appointed by the City Council to provide oversight, hear appeals of petition decisions, and approve regulations.
The proposed board would have two members who are rental tenants, two local landlords or property managers, and three members with no financial interest or ownership of rental housing. The board will be separate from the existing rental housing mediation board.
The program also includes a rental registry in which landlords will have to register each qualified unit by Jan. 1, 2027, or within 30 days of registration forms being made available, whichever is later.
Registration has to include the unit address, the number of bathrooms and bedrooms, landlord contact information, date of ownership, current rent, the date and amount of the last rent increase, and the tenant’s move-in date.
Landlords that don’t register their units won’t be allowed to collect rent, evict tenants, advertise units for rent, or petition for higher rents, according to the city staff report.
The program is expected to cost the city $2 million a year to cover 13,000 units, according to research from RSG Solutions.
That would cover the cost of staffing, enforcement, developing the rental registry, petition fees, the appeals process, outreach and data collection.
City staff still needs to conduct a fee study to determine to the amount of money per unit needed to cover program administration, a which point the council will determine how the fee is broken down between the property owner and tenants, according to the staff report.
While the city works on the ordinance, the City Council established a temporary rent freeze for the rest of 2026. In response, the Santa Barbara Rental Property Association filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging the rent freeze and eviction restrictions. That case is ongoing.
