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By Brenna Wood Fitzpatrick
The Bay Area is currently in the midst of the worst housing crisis in its history. By the time it is over, the Bay Area and the state of California will be fundamentally and irreversibly changed.
Municipalities need to embrace a wide array of strategies to counter the displacement of community members. But since 1995, one of the most important tools in the municipal toolbox — robust rent control — has been missing, thanks to the passage of the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act.
Costa-Hawkins prevents municipalities from passing robust rent control. Primarily, Costa-Hawkins:
• Prohibits rent control from being imposed on single-family homes and condos.
• Prohibits vacancy control.
• Prohibits rent control on properties built after February 1995.
• Effectively prevents early adopters of rent control from implementing controls on properties built after an even earlier date (1979 in San Francisco and San Jose, 1980 in Oakland and Berkeley).
Voters have a chance this November to overturn Costa-Hawkins by voting yes on Proposition 10, and thus restore the ability of municipalities to explore and implement robust rent control best suited to their particular community.
Each of Costa-Hawkins’ prohibitions detrimentally affects the ability of Bay Area municipalities to stem displacement. To start with, single-family homes and condos make up a huge percentage of rentals in the sprawling Bay Area. But even if a city’s rental stock is largely composed of single-family homes and condos, city governments are powerless to implement even weak rent control over those units.
Insidiously, since the 2008 foreclosure crisis, institutional investors have gobbled up tens of thousands of single-family homes in California. Across the country, one-fourth of single-family rentals today are owned by institutional investors. Blackstone’s Invitation Homes, a publicly traded company (with a corresponding fiduciary duty to its shareholders), owns more than 12,700 single-family homes in California alone, and has dedicated almost $7 million to defeating Proposition 10. Under Costa-Hawkins, municipalities are essentially powerless to rein in the power and abuses of institutional investors like Blackstone.
Perversely, these institutional investors, and indeed every landlord in the state, already benefit from a form of “rent control” via Proposition 13. Rents rise with the market — but property taxes don’t.
Meanwhile, the inability to pass some form of vacancy control (which limits the amount rent can be increased after a tenant vacates) encourages harassment of tenants with rent control and fails to keep the rental market truly affordable.
Further, the prohibitions on San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, and other cities unfairly punish early adopters of rent control. Cities should have the flexibility to update their rent control ordinances as time passes.
Most people who oppose Proposition 10 do so because they believe it will make the housing crisis worse by discouraging building. But this is a fundamentally anti-democratic sentiment. Municipalities are keenly aware of the need for continued development. Proposition 10 does nothing more than give municipalities the ability to seriously explore, with public input, implementing a form of rent control that will best protect their community while continuing to encourage new development.
Too many families have already been displaced from the Bay Area and too many are currently struggling to make ends meet, causing them to make devastating choices in order to keep a roof over their heads. Rent control is one of the most effective tools for protecting renters from price-gouging and displacement. Voters should restore the ability of municipalities to implement robust rent control by voting yes on Proposition 10 this November.
Brenna Wood Fitzpatrick is a lifelong resident of Woodside and recent graduate of Elisabeth Haub School of Law, where she studied land use and environmental law.
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Guest opinion: For Menlo Park's Measure P or not for P, that is the questionOctober 4, 2026 11:02 am
Insidiously? Perversely? Not sure if these words are needed, but I can tell you feel “immensely” about this.
So, what I think you are attempting to convey here is that the marketplace(economics) for rentals and property taxes, is not to your liking.
And.
That government, if prop 10 passes, will pick new winners, which I assume in your argument, will be the renters. Seems so easy.
So who will be the new losers? You should have taken a class on economics to understand supply/demand curves and how government regulations effect those, in ways not originally imagined. Maybe a bit of history of housing prices, property taxation, taxation, labor rates, etc. Oh, and where do I sign up for cheap rent in Woodside, and I mean for the rest of my life, and then hand that down to my children, they grew up here and deserve it. Vote yes on 10! I deserve cheap rent in Woodside!!!
“if prop 10 passes, will pick new winners” No. Sacramento now picks the winners – time to put control back to the local level.
Passing Prop 10 puts LOCAL CONTROL back in our towns. Not big government – in this case the state government that tries to tell 40 million Californians how to live.
So yes, local towns are the new WINNERS with prop 10.
Local decisions, local control. It’s the American way.
We should take our cue on public policy from libertarians? The group whose intellectual growth stopped at the age of 14, and who figuratively (if not literally) live in Mom’s basement?
Really?
Rent control is, always and everywhere, a terrible idea.
“control is, always and everywhere, a terrible idea”
LMFTFY
BIG GOVERNMENT control, especially from Sacramento, is, always and everywhere, a terrible idea.
Bring local control back to the local level – Yes on Prop 10. Take control away from those Sacramento democrats.
Thank you, New Guy! Yes, all proponents of any form of rent control just need to open an elementary economics textbook. Rent control is the surest and fastest way to DEGRADE the housing stock in any community. It is absolutely all about economics. Why build or maintain a rental property if you are not able to obtain a market rent for it? If you want to live in squalor, vote for rent control. Why maintain the property if you can’t get a return on the repairs and upgrades? If you want property owners to keep potential rentals off the market because they cannot earn a viable return on them, vote for rent control. Why put a property under rent regulation and never be able to raise the rents to a market level? (That’s what vacancy control does, folks.) Try this: in Venezuela, not a single rental apartment building has been built since a draconian form of rent control was enacted in 1960. Is this how you think “affordable housing” will be provided anywhere in CA? A vote for Prop 10 is a VOTE FOR PROPERTY DESTRUCTION.
Note to “Libertarians: Yes on Prop 10 = Liberty”: libertarianism isn’t about local control. It’s about minimal government intervention at every level.
In any case, economists have well-studied rent control. It only help existing renters at the great expense of everyone else. Its overall effects are negative economically.
Contracts between tenants and landlords should not be dictated by government. If the contract, usually written by the landlord, calls for 90 day notice for termination of the contract, and a renter wants 6 months notice, that’s negotiable between the parties. Such a change may increase the rent. That’s as it should be. If you can’t reach an agreement, go somewhere else. Renters could negotiate a contract clause limiting rent increases to a fixed percentage for a longer term.
Rent control laws amount to a “taking” of property in violation of the Constitution of the United States. We can only hope that the new supreme court sees it that way.
Vote NO on 10! I did.
Get Sacramento politicians out of the business of picking winners.
Yes on 10, local decisions are always better than state wide edicts.
It’s quite obvious that Ms Fitzpatrick has zero training in Economics and little real world experience. Rent control has never worked anywhere; there is real world proof of this everywhere.
The arguments put forth about local control vs control at the state level are spurious. Government at all levels should just get out of the way. Any legislators who profess to be smarter than market forces are just deluding themselves. The only solution for the affordable housing crisis is MORE HOUSING. Rent control always does just the opposite.
Economists don’t agree on much of anything, but one thing they ALL agree on is that rent control DOES NOT WORK. The economics of rent control are all negative. You want to increase your housing stock of rentals? Don’t eliminate the profit for those that build or own them. No one in their right mind will build something or own something they can’t make a profit from.
Thank you for writing your opinion on Prop 10. Rent regulation is an important tool for stabilizing communities and cities should be free to apply it. This recent review of the research on rent regulations from USC (https://dornsife.usc.edu/pere/rent-matters ) concluded,
“While more research remains to be done, the evidence does suggest that the strident debate about rent regulations may be driven more by ideology and self-interest—on all sides—and that public policy would benefit from a more measured discussion. What this review of literature suggests to us is that rent regulations are one tool to deal with sharp upticks in rent. They have less deleterious effects than is often imagined—particularly if we are talking about more moderate rent stabilization measures—and they do seem to promote resident stability and can therefore help to slow the displacement dimension of gentrification.
At the same time, proponents of rent stabilization must be clear that limiting rent increases cannot fully solve the housing crisis confronting much of urban California. That will require that rent regulations be combined with robust efforts to promote housing supply, particularly of affordable units, and job training and economic development programs that can lift incomes and promote mobility. Such a multipronged approach can help to deal with the housing stresses and strains that are currently worrying renters, owners, and employers alike.”
The author gives ‘institutional investors’ such as Blackstone Properties as the primary proof that prop 10 is needed:
“Insidiously, since the 2008 foreclosure crisis, institutional investors have gobbled up tens of thousands of single-family homes in California. Across the country, one-fourth of single-family rentals today are owned by institutional investors. Blackstone’s Invitation Homes, a publicly traded company (with a corresponding fiduciary duty to its shareholders), owns more than 12,700 single-family homes in California alone, and has dedicated almost $7 million to defeating Proposition 10.”
The fact is, as written, Prop 10 threatens individual, small-time, property owners who use their property to help support themselves, and in some cases, protect themselves from inability to afford to stay in their homes.
If you are going to list institutional investors as your argument in favor of prop 10, then beyond Blacksotone, why not also take aim at institutional investors like Stanford, Google, FaceBook, Apple, Amazon and others who buy and develop land in our cities and towns to expand their operations without fully taking into consideration the impact on all of us — our local schools, access for emergency vehicles, local owners AND renters.
Why the lack of focus on the institutions that have added hugely to the lack of housing and the uptick in traffic brought by their huge developments that brings in thousands of additional employees?
Prop 10 takes aim at the average citizen — the individual owners (without and *with* mortgages) who can least afford this kind of council-driven impact.
According to the authors own argument, Prop 10 as written, makes no sense at all because it doesn’t address the root cause — institutional expansion/development without proportionate institutional development of housing and contribution to local services to offset their expansion. This expansion, BTW, has been enabled by our city government and particulalrly our city councils — the very people who Prop 10 proposes to put in charge of local rent control.
Irony upon irony.