The CASA Compact Must Do More For Tenants. Here’s Why.

The Committee to House the Bay Area (CASA) process has come to a close and ideas within the proposal will now move forward in 2019 through the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) and Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG), and likely the state legislature. The policies that come out of this process will impact housing, development, and displacement in the whole Bay Area and perhaps even the state.

Tenants Together engaged as a technical committee member, giving policy advice but lacking decision-making power, and attended to mitigate any negative outcomes from this process. We were hesitant to be involved as we have very rarely seen decent protections for tenants passed by engaging in task forces, committees, or advisory boards. These can be spaces to educate and build relationships, but should not be pursued at the expense of organizing. Our voices are too easily eclipsed and ignored in advisory roles because the core problem remains that tenants don’t have enough power in our communities and our time is best spent building that power, not getting mired in processes meant to delay our organizing and cut deals from a position of weakness. We joined because our allies asked us to do so, and our participation was an important counterweight to the participation of the California Apartment Association.

At the final vote of the Technical Committee on CASA, Tenants Together voted that the CASA “compact” should not move forward without major changes. We do not endorse the CASA “compact” as-is, and we disagree with many of its proposals. We are releasing this statement to clarify where we disagree and shine a light on a committee process that has received little attention relative to its impact.

What has come out of the process reads as a developer wishlist with few meaningful tenant protections. With a steering and technical committee composed of a majority of developer and business interests, this is not a surprise. Tenants Together was the sole renters’ rights organization asked to participate on the committee, as well as only a few city housing departments and a few allied community organizations. At initial meetings of the tenant protection working group, it became clear that most engaging in the CASA process knew little about tenants’ rights, and how rent control and just cause for eviction programs work. Many were willing to be educated, but we had to wade through a lot of misinformation before engaging in meaningful conversation. The tenant protections presented in CASA are more of a baseline from which to build, not model policy. In contrast, CASA was able to get into very technical detail on the housing production side. This imbalance was the direct result of who was invited to engage in the process. This is the main reason for several key problems with the CASA proposal, as follows:

1. The CASA process to engage directly impacted communities was not extensive enough to work through proposal details in a way that would do no harm.
2. The MTC “Sensitive Communities” map is flawed (page 39), and most obviously does not include any part of San Mateo county, Fremont, or the North Bay. The compact includes the principle to delay upzoning, streamlining, etc. for at least 3 years to allow more of an equity-driven plan for development, but this principle hinges on an effective and accurate map. It’s a problem to not include marginalized communities in the development of their own neighborhoods.
3. Against the advice of Tenants Together and allied community organizations, a last-minute change without consensus was made to the “just cause for eviction” proposal, to only cover tenants after their first year of tenancy. This means that if a tenant does not have a fixed-term lease in their first year a landlord does not have to cite a reason for eviction. This should be a universal, common-sense protection. As well a last-minute change was made to exempt owner move-ins from having to pay relocation assistance. This bucks a standard across most just cause ordinances, and even relocation ordinances that do not include just-cause protections.
4. The proposal does not include any process or principles for implementation. Ideas like the CPI + 5% rent gouging cap may be better than nothing for many communities, but there is no agreement in place to ensure that this will be proposed as a baseline and not to pre-empt or undermine cities with existing rent control. CASA, as it was formed, is not composed of the right stakeholders that should be leading tenant legislation at the regional or state level. MTC, as evidenced by their misidentifying rent review programs as rent stabilization (page 45 in this PDF), does not currently have this capacity either.
5. Tracking annual rent increases to the Consumer Price Index is a moderate, reasonable policy. With the added landlord right to petition for increases above and beyond this due to capital improvements, rent control linked to CPI has been proven to allow landlords a fair return. The current proposal may be a good baseline to start a conversation about rent control but it will not effectively protect tenants.
6. Element 7 includes public subsidy of market-rate development through tax breaks and caps on existing fees. This will undermine the development of affordable housing. The streamlining of housing approvals in Element 7 poses potentially harmful trade offs because fiscal impacts, value recapture, environmental harm mitigation, and levels of affordability for new housing remain unknown.
7. There is no guarantee that protections and new revenues for affordable housing are in place before zoning and streamlining changes in Elements 5, 6, and 7. CASA participants have acknowledged the importance of moving the compact forward as a package, and the most politically difficult elements should be first priority.
8. Funding for protection and preservation is imbalanced at 30% of proposed revenue. Tenant protections and preservation strategies should not be allocated the minority of funding, particularly if ideas like a tenant right to counsel are to be implemented regionally.

Despite the many flaws, there were positive outcomes from the CASA process. Through tireless advocacy of groups like Faith in Action Bay Area, Urban Habitat, Public Advocates, Council of Community Housing Organizations, The San Francisco Foundation, and others, what at the outset may have been only a conversation about production and streamlining, ended up including protection and preservation strategies as well. Those strategies, if done with care and strategic planning, could be an important baseline for cities without any rent control or eviction protections. The process also was a learning experience for advocates that may assume developers and landlords always share the same interests. Advocates were able to get developers to endorse and promote tenant protections over the objections of for-profit landlords. The California Apartment Association was regularly marginalized in this process when they were unwilling to compromise and engage in even the most moderate renters’ rights proposals. At times developer representatives showed similar frustrations as tenant advocates with the inability of landlords to budge on the most common-sense solutions.

Considering the number of specific elements that did not have consensus, were introduced last-minute, and may have severely negative impacts, Tenants Together asserts that the CASA compact is not a compact at all, but a proposal of policy ideas that will need the engagement and buy-in of those most impacted by the housing crisis in the drafting and implementation phase. We would prefer that MTC not take on the role of drafting legislation for these policy ideas, and instead leave this work to equity and community groups. We have been concerned with summaries of the process that fail to note disagreement, fail to breakdown the diversity of committee votes and the meaning behind those votes, and instead promote CASA as a “grand bargain.” At no point did Tenants Together accept the contents of the proposal as a deal that would bind the actions of us or our member organizations. The proposal represents the bottom-line policy you might see if you put developers, landlords, and community groups in a room together. This can be helpful information, but it is not the full extent of what our communities need in this housing crisis.

We encourage the public to voice their concerns at the upcoming ABAG meeting:

January 17, 2019, 7:00 p.m.

Bay Area Metro Center

Board Room

375 Beale Street

San Francisco, California