CONCORD — Landlords will soon need to disclose why they evicted their tenants or raised rents, information that will be available online to anyone who wants to know it.
As part of the city’s new rent registry program, landlords who lease at least four units in multi-family complexes will be expected each year to provide accurate lease information, under penalty of perjury, to city officials, who will post the details online.
It’s an effort by the city to boost the transparency of local housing agreements. And while landlords say the program unfairly pries into their business practices, the city hopes to produce useful evidence for future tenant-landlord disputes.
“We heard from (tenants-rights) advocates that people were being evicted often and without cause,” Brenda Kain, Concord’s housing manager, said Thursday in an interview. “The idea of a rent registry came up as a way to get more than sort of anecdotal evidence of that.”
Each year, Concord will publish a report of the data it collects from the landlords’ submissions.
Property owners will be expected to fill out forms with queries such as, “For all tenancy changes, how many move-outs were initiated by the tenant? How many move-outs were initiated by the owner?” as well as rent amounts and reasons for any evictions.
Tenants’ names and their apartment numbers will be withheld for privacy reasons, but many other details — including how much tenants paid in rent at move-in, which can be used to track rent changes that predated the program — will be available on the city’s website.
At a meeting Tuesday, the City Council unanimously approved the kinds of data it will collect from landowners registered in the program, which will be run by a third-party consulting firm and paid for by landlords at a yearly rate of about $5 per unit.
With encouragement from local housing advocates, the council agreed to make all the information it receives public, despite several landlords vehemently protesting what they described as an invasive overstep by the city.
“Once this data gets out there, you can’t bring it back,” said Lisa Gottlieb, who manages properties in Concord, at the council meeting. “I would much rather, if we have to do this, start out small, and then increase if necessary.”
Much of the information required in the rent registry program is already publicly available, but another speaker, David Kreutzinger, chastised Councilman Edi Birsan for wanting to display landlords’ details online, including phone numbers.
“I’d be tempted to use Edi Birsan’s phone numbers so all the real estate agents could call him every hour to try to buy all of his properties instead of calling me,” Kreutzinger said.
But the council held firm that the data should be made public, with city attorney Susanne Brown saying the courts have previously determined that landlords aren’t entitled to privacy over the information the city intends to seek.
Birsan especially pushed for transparency, dismissing a proposal for the city to privately collect information and provide it to tenants only upon request as a poor lawmaking approach.
“I don’t like the idea of government collecting secret data that’s not available to people — that’s not right,” Birsan said. “I can understand privacy issues, but one of the purposes of policy is we do not make policy with secret data.”
Local housing advocates who spoke at the meeting also pushed the council to approve creating the online information portal.
Alex Werth of the nonprofit group East Bay Housing Organizations urged the council to include move-in rent prices in the policy, saying that rent changes would otherwise be far tougher to track until years of data were collected.
Another speaker, Nicole Zapata of local coalition Raise the Roof Concord, said it’s been nearly impossible for housing advocates in the past to retrieve information about properties where tenants were evicted or rent was increased.
“Granting tenants access is a way to have the information be verified,” she said.
In the past, Concord has seen swells of activism in the wake of rent hikes, with groups of residents pushing for more protections. The city established a residential tenant protection program last year, months after it had resisted pursuing rent-control policies.
A state law passed in 2019 already prevents landlords from raising rent by more than 5% (plus the consumer price index) in a 12-month period.
Meanwhile, the state’s moratorium on evictions amid the coronavirus pandemic is set to expire Jan. 31, but California lawmakers and Gov. Gavin Newsom have sought to extend the ban until the end of 2021.
