Rent stabilization by any other name is rent control—and Santa Maria doesn’t want to have it. According to one group of upset city residents, it’s all Mayor Alice Patino’s and City Councilmember Etta Waterfield’s faults.
The group—the North Santa Barbara County Manufacture Homeowners Team—has been begging the city to do something about the ever-increasing cost of renting land in mobile home parks for mobile home owners. They own the homes they live in, but not the land those homes sit on.
“I’ve been [in meetings] a couple of times, and Patino and Waterfield are hand in hand,” team-member Eileen Armijo said. “I think they just wish we’d go away.”
You’re probably not wrong, Eileen.
In 2019, the city finally decided to do as little as possible about the problem—passing a “model lease” ordinance that mobile home park owners can use if they want to. The lease sets the cap on rent increases at 6 percent per year, but who cares if nobody is required to use the lease? As part of that 2019 deal, the city also agreed not to bring a rent control ordinance forward for about a decade.
Wow. Slow clap for business interests and a big back-hand for low-income city residents.
Councilmember Gloria Soto is so done with the situation that she called the council “stubborn” and the process for getting things on the council’s agenda “frustrating” because the mayor is the only one who can authorize agenda items (which is normal for most cities).
The real issue, of course, is one of affordability and how much a city should do to step in and avert the market forces that make things unaffordable. The majority of Santa Maria’s City Council—including the hand-holding besties—isn’t about to have government step in to do anything.
So Soto is on her own.
“Now, more than ever, it’s imperative to protect affordable housing, and mobile homes are a type of affordable housing that houses some of our most vulnerable residents in our community,” Soto said.
And homelessness in Santa Maria is on the rise right alongside inflation. The preliminary results of the February 2022 Point-In-Time Count show that homelessness in the city is up almost 20 percent over 2020’s numbers.
Santa Barbara County Homeless Assistance Program Manager Kimberlee Albers believes the number will continue to climb with inflation as housing in the area becomes even more unaffordable than it already is.
This is something that team-member Armijo is concerned about as she watches the rents in the mobile home park she lives in continue to climb unabated.
“What I don’t understand is the city wants and needs affordable housing, and yet mobile homes for seniors could be affordable housing but [rents] are going up at atrocious rates,” Armijo said. “How do you justify that?”
Well. The city only “wants” affordable housing because the state of California requires it. If it were up to Patino and Waterfield, the market could push the affordable right out of the city’s housing, and they’d be just fine.
The Canary has an inflated ego. Send thoughts to [email protected].
