For years, activist groups have organized Concord to demand rent control. When their initial efforts were unsuccessful, they pressured the city council to adopt a rent registry.
In January 2021, the Concord City Council succumbed to pressure and approved a new bureaucracy called the Rent Registry, requiring housing providers to submit private rental data. Activists claimed this tracking was necessary to “guide housing policies” despite demographic data being readily available from multiple sources. Many opposed this as unnecessary government intrusion into private information.
Councilmember Laura Hoffmeister cautioned supporters: “If we come out with data and it doesn’t prove your concepts that all the rents are going out of control in Concord and everybody is being evicted, and we got a problem, and we need to do rent control and it doesn’t show that, you need to stand by the data that comes out of it.”
Twenty-one months later, the city released its October 2022 Rent Registry report, which found:
- Rents in Concord are among the lowest in the Bay Area
- Rent increases fell below the statewide rent cap
- No mass evictions were occurring
- 94% of tenancy terminations in 2022 were due to renters voluntarily vacating their units
- 88% of owner-initiated terminations were due to non-payment of rent – a legal cause for termination
A September 2023 city report further confirmed that “Rents in Concord currently support households earning between 70% to 80% AMI, which is considered to be accessible to low to moderate income households and is generally accessible to working families.”
The data was clear—there is no rent or eviction crisis in Concord. It’s a welcoming, diverse, and affordable community where rents are reasonable and arbitrary evictions are rare.
Yet in January 2023, the City Council ignored their own data and committed to adopting rent control. The question shifted from “Should Concord adopt rent control?” to “What is the strictest form of rent control Concord should adopt to appease activists?” Councilmember Hoffmeister’s warning came true, and an extremely restrictive version of rent control was later adopted.
Today, the same activist groups are pressuring the council to maintain this strict form, urging rejection of proposed amendments that would help protect naturally occurring affordable housing, housing quality, and housing diversity.
Their defense? Insufficient data – ironically, the very data they initially demanded in January 2021. It’s perplexing.
How do you ask for data to warrant a change in the law when the data didn’t exist to justify the law in the first place?
These are real questions that deserve thoughtful answers. The Concord City Council took the right action to correct course by adopting reasonable amendments based on the very data they commissioned. Using their own findings helps to ensure Concord remains affordable and well-maintained for years to come.
–Rhovy Lyn Antonio, Senior Vice President of Local Public Affairs, California Apartment Association