Oceanside drops plan to protect residential tenants

Residential tenant protections tentatively approved earlier this month by the Oceanside City Council were dropped Wednesday after a council member changed his vote for the program.

The protections, such as relocation assistance, were intended to aid people facing unfair evictions and help renters stay in their homes. On Sept. 3 the City Council voted 3-2, with Mayor Esther Sanchez and Councilmember Peter Weiss opposed, for a modified version of the proposal.

The council defeated a separate proposed rent stabilization program on a 2-3 vote, with Sanchez, Councilmember Rick Robinson and Weiss opposed.

However, when the tenant protection ordinance introduced Sept. 3 was brought back to the council Wednesday for a second and final approval, usually a routine matter, Robinson said he had second thoughts and switched his vote from yes to no.

“For days (after the initial vote) I felt like I did the wrong thing,” Robinson said, adding that the changes proposed would not “keep people in their homes.”

Councilmembers Eric Joyce and Jimmy Figueroa, who together proposed the tenant protections, defended the idea again Wednesday as a way to keep rentals affordable in Oceanside.

“We brought this forward to prevent families from being displaced,” Figueroa said. “We are losing members of our workforce to Escondido … to Menifee.”

Joyce called the protections “a modest proposal” that would close loopholes in rental contracts and help city officials collect data needed to improve the housing market.

“People are being moved out of their houses so the rent can be raised,” Joyce said.

Robinson voted in favor of the proposal earlier after Joyce offered two concessions in an effort to reach a compromise.

One concession was to drop the landlord’s one-month payment at the market rate and leave it at the rental contract rate specified by state law. Under existing law, a landlord must pay one month’s rent at the rate in the contract for any tenant evicted for no fault of the tenant. The original Oceanside proposal would have switched that payment to the current market rate, which could be significantly higher for anyone who has lived in the same place for several years or longer.

The other concession involved a proposal to apply the local tenant protections to virtually all rental housing. State law only applies the protections to housing that is at least 15 years old. As a compromise, Joyce amended the local proposal to include housing at least 10 years old.

Robinson said Wednesday he admired Joyce’s efforts to reach an agreement, but that with time to think it over he decided it was not the solution.

San Diego County cities have some of the highest rents in the nation. In Oceanside’s 92054 ZIP code, the average fair-market rent this year is $2,330 a month for a one-bedroom unit and $4,590 for four bedrooms, according to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.

About 50 people addressed the Oceanside City Council on the topic at the Sept. 3 meeting. Most of them said the protections would help prevent budget-stressed workers and families from sliding into the homelessness that plagues the region.

Representatives of the Building Industry Association of San Diego County and owners of large-scale rental properties opposed the protections, saying they would slow housing construction and add levels of cost and administration to city government.

The Oceanside proposal was intended to strengthen and expand the state’s Tenant Protection Act of 2019, also known as AB 1482.

The city of San Diego approved additional renter protections in 2023 that included limits on no-fault evictions such as requiring a landlord to provide the tenant relocation assistance along with two months’ rent.