Correspondence - #33 - Laserfiche WebLink

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City Sitting on Roughly $25 Million in Rental Assistance for No Good Reason The City is apparently seeking to establish a "regulatory framework and infrastructure necessary to implement residential rent stabilization, just cause eviction, and other protections for tenants" that would rival the California Employment Development Department in its inability to serve those who need help the most. Take for example the more than $42 million of Emergency Rental Assistance program funding from federal and state agencies that has been allocated to the City of Santa Ana's COVID-19 Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP). Only 3.6% of Santa Ana households have been helped to date and even with the new reported funds disbursement rate itwould take well over another year to ensure all the funds are allocated. If the City can't even manage to get free money to the tune of $25 million through ERAP in the hands of tenants, one must wonder how it proposes to manage a program that will be reliant on "the collection of fees from owners and the hiring of at least 25 staff... based on the future fiscal impact of the ordinances [which] is unknown... due to the nature of this due diligence process, which could take staff from 9 to 12 months to complete." Ignorance of Existing State Protections Does Not Justify Bad Local Policy Since the start of the pandemic, the California State Legislature has passed various eviction moratoria to keep residents housed and the Judicial Council of California approved on April 6, 2020 rules, including effectively suspending all unlawful detainer actions until ninety days after California's COVID-19 state of emergency ends. This suspends the issuance of a summons and entry of defaults in unlawful detainer actions, meaning new unlawful detainer cases cannot be filed in most circumstances, unless there is a health and safety reason. Through spring 2022, in accordance with AB 832, property owners are required to take steps in compliance with state law to demonstrate that they have made a good faith effort to seek rental assistance for a tenant or that they worked with a tenant who is seeking relief before seeking the termination of residential tenancy. Moreover, existing statewide rent control and just cause law (AB 1482 - Tenant Protection Aci of 2019) provides a consistent standard to all tenants, the courts, and landlords. The proposed local ordinances only seek to cause confusion when robust tenant protections already exist. Rent Control Leads to Unintended Consequences, Hurting the Community In a 2016 report on "Perspectives on Helping Low -Income Californians Afford Housing" by the California Legislative Analyst's Office, researchers found that "many housing programs - vouchers, rent control, and inclusionary housing - attempt to make housing more affordable without increasing the overall supply of housing [and] this approach does very little to address the underlying problem." I;