Mountain View: Council amends mobile home rent control law to prevent park owners from skirting oversight
MOUNTAIN VIEW — In an effort to provide more protections to mobile park residents, the Mountain View City Council has agreed to strike a loophole in the city’s mobile home rent control ordinance that allowed park owners to create their own rent agreements with tenants outside of the city’s control.
The council’s decision this week comes nine months after it passed a new rent control law for its six mobile home parks where residents have seen unfair rent increases over the past decade as Silicon Valley’s housing crisis exacerbated.
The mobile home rent control law prevents mobile home park owners from increasing rents alone, instead giving that power to the Rental Housing Committee which oversees the city’s rental increases, oversight and protections for apartments as well as mobile home parks. Rent control for apartments was approved by the council in 2017 after a similarly long struggle by resident advocates squeezed by a relentless Bay Area economy.
But when council members agreed last year to extend rent control to mobile homes, they made an exemption for park owners who strike their own “Memorandums of Understanding,” or MOUs, with mobile home owners and renters in their parks. Any park that strikes such an agreement would not be subject to the city’s monitoring, oversight and governing structure under rent control.
On Tuesday — after months of public outreach and an attempt by city staff, mobile home park owners and park residents to create a model agreement outside the city’s rent control ordinance — five of seven council members were unconvinced that an agreement separate from the city’s existing rent control law would provide more protections with less cost for residents.
Sally Lieber, among the harshest critics of making exemptions to mobile home rent control, said that while last fall she felt that the city should do its due diligence on agreements outside of rent control now the city should just stick with its law and not make any exemptions.
“When this was last before us, I felt that we should really do the due diligence of pursuing a memorandum of understanding,” Lieber said. “We have now done that and it has produced absolutely nothing.”
In the meantime, Lieber said, “we know that rent control is working and protecting our community members in Mountain View and that is what our first allegiance and our work should be toward.” She added that the council should be focused on “really upping the stakes consistently to offer stronger and stronger and stronger protections,” not go back to the starting point.
Vice Mayor Alison Hicks agreed with Lieber, who said that after three or four years of hearing about the need for rent control for mobile homes the council shouldn’t make any exemptions.
“The beauty of this being a council ordinance rather than a citizen initiative is that I intend to stay in touch with mobile home residents and if we need to bring back for further changes, the council will be able to do that,” Hicks said. “This is not the end of the story.”
Still, council members Lisa Matichak and Margaret Abe-Koga, who dissented in this week’s decision to strike all exemptions from the mobile home rent control ordinance, wanted the city to spend more time figuring out how to make protections under a memorandum of understanding or accord be similar to or better than those provided by the city.
Matichak said that the city’s efforts to do away with exemptions for MOUs and accords are ignoring the residents’ desires.
“We’ve heard from a lot of residents of the Sunset Estates Park via email and consistently they indicate that they would like the opportunity to vote on an MOU and I know that’s been more people than I’ve heard from that want that than have spoken at the meeting tonight,” Matichak said. “I’m concerned that we wouldn’t acknowledge and listen to them. To just dismiss that amount of public input is troubling to me.”
Matichak then asked council members to support a separate motion to keep the exemption in the rent control ordinance and continue to work with city staff, park owners and residents to set up an agreement outside the city’s control.
That motion failed to pass in a 3-4 vote, but not before Vice Mayor Hicks pushed back at Matichak for her motion.
“I’m not comfortable with the back of the napkin sketching out of an MOU, it makes me extremely uncomfortable and I don’t think we know what we’re getting into or if the staff has vetted it and it would take a lot of staff time and effort to work it further,” Hicks said. “With so much on our plate, I want our staff to be devoted to good future housing projects and not tied up endlessly in this particular item.
“I would be happy to, except there is already a mobile home ordinance, people in mobile homes will already be well covered so I think our staff should be better devoted to other projects.”