Prop 33 failed to pass. Here’s what this means for California renters and landlords.

Last November, as California voters either rejoiced or mourned the results of the presidential election, ballot measure Proposition 33 silently failed to pass with 61% of voters in opposition.

Prop 33 would have repealed the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act of 1995, which prevents local governments from imposing local rent control ordinances. With its failure to pass, governments will continue to have a limited toolkit for addressing rising housing costs.

Law professor Richard Ford ’88 remembered a time when housing costs were more accessible. “It was possible as a student at Stanford to rent an apartment in Palo Alto,” he said. “It was [even] cheaper than living in the dorms if you shared it.”

That is no longer the case. According to the Public Policy Institute of California, over half of the state’s renters spend at least 30% of their household income on rent. The issue is particularly salient in the Bay Area, where housing prices rose by 24% between 2000 and 2016, compared to a 9% increase in the incomes of those renting.

For many current students, this problem hits close to home. “I know a lot of students [who], when they leave Stanford… often make the calculation to live at home for the first couple years after they graduate because it just makes more financial sense,” said Evan Schieber ’25, a public policy major.

Housing affordability is a matter of public health and wellbeing, according to Maeve Brown, executive director of the Housing and Economic Rights Advocates. “It is massively stressful to think that maybe you can’t afford your rent some month, or if you’re between housing,” she said.

Supporters of Prop 33 say that it was intended to be the solution to this very problem. By reversing the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, the proposition would have prevented landlords from raising rents once current tenants move out, as well as allowed city governments to implement rent control policies that affect single-family homes and buildings built after 1995. 

Although California’s Tenant Protection Act of 2019 does provide some degree of rent control statewide, Prop 33 attempted to address the lack of policy autonomy for individual cities.

According to Brown, the failure of Prop 33 is highly relevant to students and other vulnerable populations, especially since these groups are usually the targets of forced displacement. Vacancy decontrol, outlined in the Costa-Hawkins Act, “creates a perverse incentive for property owners to go ahead and try to shove tenants out the door any way that they can,” she said.

Brown recalls an instance where an out-of-state corporation bought buildings where students primarily lived to repurpose the properties for higher-income renters. “The entity that bought the building claimed that they were going to undertake renovations as a way of shoving everybody out,” she said. However, the corporation never intended to remodel,  evident by how they hadn’t applied for the relevant permits.

Jeremy Beltram, deputy director of the Housing Rights Center, has observed cases of landlords going as far as to evict long-term renters in order to raise rents. According to Beltran, this is incentivized by California’s “no fault” eviction policies, which allow landlords to remove good tenants as long as they compensate tenants with the equivalent of one month’s rent. “Maintaining these long-term tenants is not in [landlords’] best interest because they want to increase the rents,” he concluded.

On the other hand, Ford, who formerly served as commissioner of the San Francisco Housing Authority, cautioned against viewing increased rent control as a magic bullet. 

“As a general, broad affordable housing measure, rent control is unlikely to be effective, because it intervenes in the market in a way that’s going to make some housing more affordable, but they will make other housing more expensive,” he said, adding that rent control policies favor incumbents, further distorting the market. Since rent controls would constrain supply, it disproportionately harms in-movers, he said.

Although Ford said he did not believe increasing rent controls would help housing affordability, he thought it could help combat the effects of gentrification.

Joint research by economists from Stanford and UC Berkeley, for example, found that rent control policies in San Francisco helped prevent the displacement of racial minorities. “Rent control is one of the things that allowed that community to stay in the city when it was eliminated,” Ford said. “The displacement of the African American community accelerated.”

He continued: “Rent control makes sense if your objective is to keep incumbents in their existing apartments and that’s a legitimate policy goal.”

Gabriel McPheter ’26, an urban studies major, believes that Stanford and its affiliates have an obligation to learn more about the housing crisis and efforts to address it. “Silicon Valley exists because of Stanford,” he said. “All of those high-paid workers are competing with extraordinarily low-income workers for a restricted pool of housing.”

With great power comes great responsibility, and McPheter thinks there is a straightforward way for the University to help mitigate the problem. 

“If we just took a fraction of [Stanford’s endowment] to pay our workers some more money to afford to live here, or to build housing for them to live here themselves on the plenty of open land that Stanford owns, it could really make a difference,” McPheter said.

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