Council amends mobile home rent control law to prevent park owners from skirting oversight

MOUNTAIN View — In an hard work to provide much more protections to cellular park inhabitants, the Mountain Look at Town Council has agreed to strike a loophole in the city’s mobile home rent regulate ordinance that permitted park owners to produce their individual rent agreements with tenants exterior of the city’s management.

The council’s final decision this 7 days will come 9 months following it passed a new hire command law for its 6 cell house parks where by residents have noticed unfair lease boosts around the past decade as Silicon Valley’s housing crisis exacerbated.

The mobile dwelling lease manage law helps prevent mobile residence park house owners from escalating rents by yourself, rather giving that electrical power to the Rental Housing Committee which oversees the city’s rental will increase, oversight and protections for residences as effectively as mobile home parks. Rent manage for apartments was accredited by the council in 2017 soon after a likewise prolonged wrestle by resident advocates squeezed by a relentless Bay Spot overall economy.

But when council users agreed final calendar year to increase rent control to cell homes, they designed an exemption for park house owners who strike their own “Memorandums of Knowing,” or MOUs, with mobile dwelling entrepreneurs and renters in their parks. Any park that strikes these kinds of an settlement would not be subject to the city’s monitoring, oversight and governing construction underneath hire regulate.

On Tuesday — soon after months of public outreach and an endeavor by metropolis staff, cell property park homeowners and park residents to develop a model settlement outside the house the city’s hire regulate ordinance — five of 7 council members were unconvinced that an arrangement individual from the city’s current lease management regulation would give much more protections with less cost for residents.

Sally Lieber, among the the harshest critics of generating exemptions to mobile residence hire regulate, reported that whilst last tumble she felt that the city should do its because of diligence on agreements outdoors of rent regulate now the town need to just stick with its legislation and not make any exemptions.

“When this was very last before us, I felt that we should really really do the thanks diligence of pursuing a memorandum of being familiar with,” Lieber said. “We have now done that and it has developed completely absolutely nothing.”

In the meantime, Lieber reported, “we know that lease manage is working and protecting our group users in Mountain View and that is what our 1st allegiance and our work must be toward.” She extra that the council ought to be targeted on “really upping the stakes regularly to offer you much better and stronger and more powerful protections,” not go back to the beginning point.

Vice Mayor Alison Hicks agreed with Lieber, who explained that just after three or four a long time of hearing about the need to have for hire management for cellular houses the council shouldn’t make any exemptions.

“The attractiveness of this currently being a council ordinance relatively than a citizen initiative is that I intend to stay in contact with cellular residence citizens and if we will need to deliver again for further more alterations, the council will be in a position to do that,” Hicks said. “This is not the end of the story.”

Nonetheless, council customers Lisa Matichak and Margaret Abe-Koga, who dissented in this week’s choice to strike all exemptions from the mobile property hire command ordinance, preferred the metropolis to shell out additional time figuring out how to make protections under a memorandum of being familiar with or accord be very similar to or better than these supplied by the metropolis.

Matichak stated that the city’s initiatives to do away with exemptions for MOUs and accords are ignoring the residents’ desires.

“We’ve listened to from a large amount of inhabitants of the Sunset Estates Park by using email and continuously they show that they would like the option 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 stated. “I’m involved that we would not accept and pay attention to them. To just dismiss that amount of public enter is troubling to me.”