Council amends mobile home rent control law to prevent park owners from skirting oversight

MOUNTAIN Look at — In an effort and hard work to present additional protections to mobile park people, the Mountain Check out Metropolis Council has agreed to strike a loophole in the city’s cellular home hire command ordinance that permitted park owners to create their own hire agreements with tenants outside of the city’s regulate.

The council’s selection this week arrives 9 months right after it handed a new rent command regulation for its six cell house parks exactly where citizens have observed unfair rent improves around the past ten years as Silicon Valley’s housing crisis exacerbated.

The cellular residence hire management law prevents cell home park house owners from expanding rents by yourself, in its place supplying that electricity to the Rental Housing Committee which oversees the city’s rental will increase, oversight and protections for apartments as nicely as cellular house parks. Lease regulate for residences was approved by the council in 2017 after a likewise very long wrestle by resident advocates squeezed by a relentless Bay Area financial state.

But when council users agreed final 12 months to lengthen hire handle to mobile homes, they produced an exemption for park entrepreneurs who strike their personal “Memorandums of Understanding,” or MOUs, with cellular residence owners and renters in their parks. Any park that strikes such an arrangement would not be subject matter to the city’s monitoring, oversight and governing structure beneath lease regulate.

On Tuesday — following months of general public outreach and an attempt by city personnel, cellular household park house owners and park people to create a model arrangement outdoors the city’s lease control ordinance — 5 of seven council members were being unconvinced that an arrangement individual from the city’s existing lease management regulation would present far more protections with fewer price for people.

Sally Lieber, among the the harshest critics of earning exemptions to mobile residence lease regulate, said that when very last slide she felt that the city should do its due diligence on agreements outdoors of hire management now the city need to just stick with its regulation and not make any exemptions.

“When this was previous in advance of us, I felt that we need to actually do the owing diligence of pursuing a memorandum of understanding,” Lieber stated. “We have now finished that and it has generated unquestionably almost nothing.”

In the meantime, Lieber explained, “we know that lease regulate is functioning and preserving our local community associates in Mountain Check out and that is what our initially allegiance and our function really should be toward.” She added that the council need to be concentrated on “really upping the stakes consistently to offer stronger and much better and much better protections,” not go back again to the beginning position.

Vice Mayor Alison Hicks agreed with Lieber, who claimed that immediately after 3 or four years of listening to about the need to have for hire control for mobile houses the council should not make any exemptions.

“The splendor of this currently being a council ordinance instead than a citizen initiative is that I intend to remain in touch with cell property citizens and if we require to bring back again for additional alterations, the council will be capable to do that,” Hicks said. “This is not the conclude of the story.”

Nonetheless, council users Lisa Matichak and Margaret Abe-Koga, who dissented in this week’s decision to strike all exemptions from the cellular house lease control ordinance, needed the city to shell out a lot more time figuring out how to make protections less than a memorandum of knowledge or accord be related to or greater than people furnished by the metropolis.

Matichak said that the city’s efforts to do absent with exemptions for MOUs and accords are ignoring the residents’ desires.

“We’ve heard from a ton of citizens of the Sunset Estates Park through electronic mail and continually they suggest that they would like the chance to vote on an MOU and I know that is been far more people today than I have listened to from that want that than have spoken at the meeting tonight,” Matichak explained. “I’m concerned that we wouldn’t accept and listen to them. To just dismiss that quantity of public input is troubling to me.”