Southeast Area is Movin’ On Up!
Look around my multifamily neighborhood southeast of Beverly and Wilshire. You can’t miss the changes: newly spruced-up properties market remodeled
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Dan Yukelson
Rent Control & Higher Rents: Chicken-and-Egg Conundrum!
A Renters Alliance foot soldier forwarded a recent business section article from the Orange County Register titled, Fallout From State’s Rent Control Debate: More Rent Hikes. It caught my attention because it presupposes a familiar landlord argument: rent control leads to higher rents. Or is it that sharply higher rents lead to political support for rent control? Seems to me that this classic chicken-and-egg question deserves more thought than the premise implied by the article title.
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Rent Stabilization Fallacy Exhibit A: 169 North Clark
Local landlord Dan Yukelson recently circulated an email to city power brokers that claimed rent stabilization is harming mom-and-pop multifamily property owners in Beverly Hills. “These are ‘long time’ housing providers being forced out of business by over regulation and bad housing policies in Beverly Hills,” it says, and linked to several multifamily properties for sale. So we had a look. The listings don’t support specious claims but instead make the opposite argument: multifamily is still a money-minting business!
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Time Heals All Wounds as Landlord’s Assets Values Rise
It is high praise is to be called out by a landlord for being a “zealot” or for orchestrating a “dog-and-pony show” that successfully brought no-just-cause termination to an end in Beverly Hills. We are guilty as charged! But we can take special pride in being the focus of an amateur gumshoe investigation by the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles, the “voice of multifamily housing.”
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Do Communists Celebrate Christmas?
Vice-Mayor John Mirisch posted this rhetorical question on Instagram: Do Communists celebrate Christmas? “The Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles evidently thinks so,” he said. “They sent our mayor a ‘present’ equating our efforts to craft a rent stabilization ordinance with Communism.” This ‘red scare’ tactic is all the more ironic because it invokes religion — an anathema to communists!
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Landlords Say Tenants Were Happy With RSO!
Landlords claim that we tenants were a happy lot before City of Beverly Hills mucked around with the rent stabilization ordinance. They hardly ever hit us with excessive rent increases, they say, and properties were maintained just fine. No-just-cause eviction was not even a thing, so why fix what wasn’t broke? This latest attempt to roll back tenant protections isn’t fooling anybody: this was a system that did need fixing.
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Landlords File Federal Lawsuit to Invalidate Registry
Beverly Hills landlords never liked the city’s rental unit registry. They fought tooth-and-nail against this ledger of landlords, properties and tenancies because this must-have rent-stabilization tool would hold landlords accountable to the law. Last year the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles brought a Superior Court lawsuit to tank it. Now they are back again with their federal case and a new local landlord plaintiff.
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AAGLA Sees Ghosts in Prop 10’s Affordable Housing Act
Last year Beverly Hills landlords saw their allowed annual rent increase drop from 10% to 3% and a city-imposed relocation fee for involuntarily-terminated households. They lost the battle for the rental unit registry and all landlords were compelled to get a business license when about one-in-ten had avoided it. If 2017 was a tough year then 2018 looks only worse should the Affordable Housing Act ballot initiative win approval from voters in November.
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AAGLA Executive Director’s Thoughts on Rent Control
‘Landlord crusader’ Dan Yukelson recently shared his thoughts about rent stabilization with the Beverly Hills Weekly and he’s not happy! The former Planning commissioner (and current executive director of the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles) capped his career in corporate finance with the purchase of a fourplex in Beverly Hills — a good investment until City Council amended the rent stabilization law, he says. But Yukelson is no naïve investor: he knows rental housing in Beverly Hills will always be the best place to invest!
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