AHF makes third push to reverse state rent control law

AIDS Healthcare Foundation is making a third attempt at overturning California’s Costa-Hawkins Act, which has limited rent control for 28 years.

AHF and its allies submitted more than 800,000 signatures May 25 to county clerks’ offices across the state for verification, in hopes of placing its Justice for Renters Act on the November 2024 ballot. It follows similar attempts to reverse the Costa-Hawkins Act that California voters rejected in 2018 and 2020.

AHF and its allies also held a demonstration at Los Angeles City Hall where comments were made by AHF president Michael Weinstein and Dolores Huerta, 93-year-old co-founder of United Farm Workers Association and a star of the labor movement. Also appearing was Susie Shannon, policy director for AHF’s division Housing Is a Human Right.

In an interview with TRD, Shannon said the Justice for Renters measure is similar to past initiatives. However, she forecast the new initiative will succeed at the ballot box, because California voters have a different mindset compared to 2018 and 2020.

“The state of California is a different place than it was four years ago,” Shannon said. “We’ve been through a pandemic. There are more adult children living with their parents because it’s harder to own a house. Rents are skyrocketing.”

The Costa-Hawkins Act of 1995 has provided guidelines which have shaped California’s rental markets. It prohibits rent control on single-family homes, condominiums and rental units that were built after 1995.

Justice for Renters has caused alarm for political conservatives such as Susan Shelley of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.

“If Costa-Hawkins is repealed, every city council and county board of supervisors could, at any time, pass a radical rent control law that completely changes the economics of the rental housing business,” Shelley wrote in an April editorial for the Orange County Register.