By Amita Sharma KPBS News & CALmatters Crooning in the shower is not Chad Regecziâs thing. Thatâs why when he learned last year his monthly rent would go up $300 so the new owners of his La Mesa apartment could upgrade his bathroom with a sound system, he was bemused. â300 bucks!â he said. âI mean an iPod costs less than that. Everybody has got a phone now. Who needs a bluetooth speaker in a bathroom apartment? Itâs just weird.â Regeczi, a VA employee, said the 30 percent rent increase didnât match the condition of his apartment. But he felt powerless to challenge his landlords on the hike. âWhoâs gonna tell them no?â he asked. âThere are no rules to how much your rent can go up.â That may change. Talk is underway about putting a law on the books that would bar California landlords from raising rent beyond a certain percentage. Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf said in November the rule would mimic limits on what businesses can charge during natural disasters. âWhen thereâs a fire, you pass an anti-rent gouging ordinance,â Schaaf said. âThe state has a fire. Itâs called the housing crisis.â Rents are surging in some California cities where there is no rent control by double, even triple digits, according to mayors and tenants rights advocates. And more than half of the stateâs renters pay more than a third of their income on housing, according to the California Budget & Policy Center.  A third of renters spend more than half of their paycheck on a place to live. The real estate firm Zillow reported last month that communities where people pay more than a third of their salary on rent, see a faster rise in homelessness. The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco is $3,500 a month, in Los Angeles itâs $2,420 and in San Diego itâs $1,950, according to the real estate search site Zumper. And Attom Data Solutions found the average rent on a three-bedroom apartment in California has risen 20 percent since 2014. The stateâs affordable housing crisis has downgraded the California Dream, that once included almost guaranteed homeownership, to a point where even renting an apartment is becoming out of reach. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has said politicians should not interpret voter rejection of the rent control initiative Proposition 10 in November to mean theyâre off the hook. âIt is not going to be good enough to say, `Well the voters spoke,ââ Garcetti said. âWe have a problem we have to confront.â Garcetti wants the state Legislature to approve an anti-price gouging rent cap. Support of such a cap may be building. Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco said legislators are mulling whether to pitch a bill as one way to deal with the stateâs 3.5 million housing unit shortage over the next decade. âThat shortage is leading to displacement, evictions, people becoming homeless, working families leaving, young people not having stable housing,â he said. Wiener sees a cap as an interim measure until more housing is built. âUntil we get there, and itâs going to take a while to get there because housing doesnât get built overnight; and it is a huge hole that we have to fill until we get there, we need to take action to keep people stable in the housing that they have.â he said. David Garcia, policy director at UC Berkeleyâs Terner Center for Housing Innovation, said the cap would protect tenants from the most egregious rent increases aimed at removing them from an apartment. âTenants receiving increases 25, 30, 40 percent which we read about all the time, those increases would be illegal,â Garcia said. Landlords donât like the idea. âItâs a form of tenant welfare, paid only by a small number of people,â Dan Faller, president of the Apartment Owners Association of California. âIf this is a society problem, then society ought to solve it. But this will make the crisis worse.â Tenants advocates, like Rafael Bautista of San Diegoâs Tenants United, worry for another reason. He said the state needs rent control that restricts annual increases to 2 percent. He believes that the proposed anti-gouging cap is a ruse for mayors to punt the housing affordability issue to the state Legislature. âItâs basically a watered-down version so that we donât pursue rent control because theyâll point to that and say, `Well, you know we have these measures in place. Why do you still need rent control?ââ Bautista said. But La Mesa resident Chad Regeczi called the cap a good start. âThis is America,â he said. âPeople want to make money. But at the same time they canât be crushing people. Itâs about whatâs acceptable, whatâs doable, whatâs fair.â Regeczi moved out of his apartment following the $300 rent increase. Heâs in a larger place now. âThis place is way nicer than that and itâs just 200 bucks more than what I was paying there,â he said. âIt doesnât even make sense.â But deja vu could be setting in. Regecziâs new place just got new owners and that may mean a new rent increase.
Amita Sharma is an investigative reporter for KPBS Public Media in San Diego. She is also a contributor to the “California Dream” project through CALmatters and other non-profit newsrooms in the state. Follow Amita on Twitter at @asharmakpbs. CALmatters.org is a non-profit, non-partisan media venture explaining California policies and politics. The Winters Express is a CALmatters media partner.]]>