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The City of Chino reached a $1.5 million settlement this month with a mobile home park owner who brought a lawsuit against the city, alleging the council’s actions caused a loss of income by delaying and interfering with plans to convert the park to resident ownership.

The lawsuit, which originally asked for $34 million, was filed in July 2010 by Chino MHC, owner of Lamplighter Chino Mobile Home Park, which is on the northwest corner of Philadelphia Street and Ramona Avenue.

SANTA CRUZ >> Expect this fall’s campaign over just cause eviction and rent control in the city of Santa Cruz to be expensive.

The measure would require relocation assistance for tenants evicted without just cause from single-family homes, accessory dwellings and condos as well as apartments built before February 1995 and limit rent increases in apartments built before that date.

Ballot arguments were due July 10 with the city clerk and rebuttals due Friday, with the first campaign finance report due July 31.

The owners of Willits Mobile Home Park and many park residents attended Wednesday’s City Council meeting to make their voices heard about raises in rent, alleged issues with the new management company Boa Vida, and a potential rent stabilization ordinance. There was standing room only at the meeting.

After much discussion, City Council decided not to move forward with implementing a rent stabilization ordinance.

SACRAMENTO — Proponents of a November ballot measure that would let California cities expand rent control say negotiations for a compromise have collapsed and that the issue will now be decided by voters.

The all-or-nothing effort to repeal the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act is likely to be one of the costliest fights of the fall election. State lawmakers had hoped to reach a deal in the Legislature that tenant and landlord groups could agree to, but that now seems “highly unlikely,” Assemblyman David Chiu, D-San Francisco, said Friday.

The latest turn in the long-running legal feud over a Carson law limiting rent increases at mobile home parks went in the city’s favor with a court ruling that could bolster cities’ abilities to regulate real estate up and down California.

The Coalition for Responsible Housing shares the dismay of the Sacramento Bee editorial board about the continued failure to meaningfully address California’s housing crisis (“Compromise on housing or face rent control,” April 19).

SACRAMENTO — A renters’ revolt in California could be heading to the November ballot as a campaign to lift decades-old restrictions on rent control reported Friday it had gathered more than enough signatures to qualify.

Organizers are planning rallies in Sacramento, Oakland and Los Angeles on Monday as they hand in the signatures, which must be counted and verified by election officials before the initiative makes it on the ballot.

After cropping up in the early 2000s, the debate around rent stabilitzation in mobile home parks has resurfaced in El Dorado County.

On Tuesday, at the request of District 3 Supervisor Brian Veerkamp, the Board of Supervisors reviewed the possibility of a rent stabilization ordinance, which would restrict the frequency of rent hikes and the amount per increase in mobile home parks within unincorporated areas of the county.

Major changes to Mountain View’s rent control law could go before Mountain View voters this fall.

The political action group Measure V Too Costly filed paperwork on Friday, March 30, for a November ballot initiative that would heavily modify Mountain View’s rent control program. The proposal, dubbed the ”Mountain View Homeowner, Renter, and Taxpayer Protection Initiative,” seeks to curtail most limits on rent increases and create income eligibility requirements for tenants.

Clipboards in hand, signature-gatherers are fanning out across four Southern California cities this month, turning up at supermarkets and metro stops and apartment complexes to pitch a measure for the November ballot that they say will be salvation for renters.

But for landlords, their pitch is blasphemy.

At issue is whether the cities of Long Beach, Inglewood, Glendale and Pasadena should join a tiny band of California cities that already have rent control and “just cause” eviction laws that prevent landlords from ousting tenants in good standing.

Mountain View’s Rental Housing Committee on Monday night reaffirmed its opposition to expanding the city’s rent control program to include mobile homes. As a result, mobile home residents warned that they would seek legal action against the city to overturn the decision.

Sacramento may emerge as a battleground in the rent control debate after experiencing some of the largest rent increases in the nation.

Mobilehome owners across the state are saving hundreds or even thousands of dollars in state fees, penalties, and local taxes through California’s Fee and Tax Waiver Program, developed by the California Department of Housing and Community Development. The program helps people who purchased a mobilehome or manufactured home but never received the necessary title or registration. The program waives many state and local taxes, fees, and penalties.

Surrounded by legal threats on all sides, Mountain View’s Rental Housing Committee on Monday backed away from plans to bring the city’s mobile home residents under the aegis of rent control.

The decision was a reversal of last month’s meeting when rental committee members acquiesced to the advice of their attorneys to begin drafting new regulations for mobile homes.

Rent control policies could actually be making income inequality worse in gentrifying cities such as San Francisco, a new paper from Stanford University researchers argues.

The working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research says the laws intended to protect certain tenants from rent hikes ended up spiking prices through many other parts of San Francisco. This follows other studies that have shown similar consequences for rent control in cities including Los Angeles, New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

Abuses of the California Environmental Quality Act are aggravating the state’s housing crisis, according to a recent study by Los Angeles lawyers Holland & Knight.

With more than half of renters and over a third of homeowners with mortgages in California cost-burdened by housing — spending more than 30 percent of household incomes on housing — and many forced to commute long distances to work in order to live in affordable housing, California’s housing crisis has made life difficult even for those with well-paying, professional jobs.

Bay Area cities are coming to realize what Ramirez already knows — parking tickets won’t solve the problem of finding a place to live. From Oakland to San Jose, officials are struggling to cope with a growing influx of RV dwellers seeking a safe, permanent place for the only homes they can afford.

“We’ve never seen it like this,” said Tom Myers, executive director of Community Services Agency of Mountain View, where the city averages more than three complaints a day about RV communities. “We have to be prepared that this will be the new normal for us. It’s a crisis.”

Barely a year old, Mountain View’s experiment with rent control has already faced a withering gauntlet of controversy and legal scuffles. Now it’s being primed for a dramatic expansion.

On Dec. 4, the city’s Rental Housing Commission is scheduled to consider expanding the Mountain View’s restrictions covering apartment rents to encompass the city’s six mobile home parks. The proposal could bring an estimated 1,100 more homes under the aegis of the city’s new tenant protections.

When you take a right turn off Higuera Street and onto South Street in San Luis Obispo, you’ll quickly come upon the Village Mobile Home Park. What used to be dotted with dozens of 1950s mobile homes and trailers is now being transformed into energy-efficient manufactured homes, mobile homes, and one tiny home.

For $1,100 a month, the 190 square foot house, which is classified as a recreational vehicle, will give a tenant pretty much everything an apartment could, with the addition of a yard and two parking spaces. The only catch, it’s much smaller. 

In an effort to try to keep people from being evicted from their homes, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to look into restoring an expired ordinance that could control rising rents at mobile home parks.

The motion, authored by supervisors Janice Hahn and Sheila Kuehl will ask county departments to examine the feasibility of such an ordinance, which could affect 102 mobile home parks in unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County.  A report is due back in 60 days.

Nearly 21,000 families in the four-county Sacramento region, and about a half-million across California, live in homes that are theoretically mobile.

For many, buying a home that’s up on blocks is one of the last opportunities for single-family homeownership in a state with some of the highest housing costs in the nation.

“If you can buy outright, it’s an affordable option,” said Michelle Hutson, who owns her double-wide mobile home in south Sacramento but rents the land beneath it for less than an apartment might cost.

Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation Thursday to prevent landlords from threatening immigrant tenants with deportation, measures he said were part of broader efforts by his administration “to bolster resources and support for the immigrant community.”

One proposal by Assemblyman David Chiu (D-San Francisco) would bar landlords from disclosing information about immigration status in order to intimidate, harass or evict tenants without following proper procedures. It also would allow immigrant tenants to file civil claims against their landlords if they do.

Despite all the housing-related proposals in Sacramento, lawmakers have apparently yet to learn that more government involvement, making housing more expensive and less profitable, is never going to solve the state’s housing affordability problems.

Discussions of housing oftentimes tend to focus on single-family developments or other types of housing for purchase, and neglect rental properties, which is unfortunate, since rentals make up nearly half of the housing stock in California.

When first asked by the Union whether she had written an email that smacked of extortion, the former head of the Yes on Measure V campaign flatly denied doing so, stating, “No! No! No! I don’t know how else to say that word – wait; nien, nay, non, nyet.”

The biggest problem facing California is housing affordability. Rent and home prices are so high that middle-income and low-income households alike often struggle to pay for shelter. In metro Los Angeles, one-fourth of households spends at least half their income on housing. As understood by Gov. Jerry Brown and anyone familiar with how free markets work, the best, most decisive and longest-lasting solution to this problem is to add housing stock.

Only 13 percent of San Francisco households can afford to pay the nearly $7,000 a month in housing costs for a median-priced home here, according to recent analysis by Paragon Realty. “By definition, half the homes sold in any given county were at prices below the median sales price, i.e. there were numerous homes that were more affordable than the median prices used in this analysis,” said the report. “However, any way one slices it, the Bay Area has one of the most expensive— if not the most expensive—and least affordable housing markets in the country.”