​Available and Affordable Housing

Our City must work smarter and create more opportunities for property owners and builders to partner with us in an effort to resolve the affordable housing crisis. We must provide tax incentives and streamline City approval processes if we ever want there to be enough housing and make it more affordable. We deserve City leaders who understand that when they raise taxes and fees, that they are raising the costs of owners and renters alike. I will be that City leader who understands.

We need to maximize the highest and best use of our existing commercial buildings. There are many partially vacant commercial properties, these could become mixed-use buildings with housing on upper floors. Incentivizing commercial property owners to convert to mixed use or multi-family housing would improve the amount of available housing in our community, and thereby help with affordability. This will be achieved without worsening city sprawl and only moderately increasing density where it makes sense.

The rental registry, pushed into law by my opponent, is just the first step to rent control. Next will be “rent stabilization,” a rebranding of rent control policies that have historically failed to fix housing problems. While on its face, this sounds good to some, it in fact hurts the very people it aims to help: the renters. I have been a renter. I am a mother of adult children who rent. I know working families are struggling just to keep a roof over their heads. They worry that they will never be able to buy their own home. These worries are real, but rent control is not the answer.  

Restricting rent increases to 3%, for example, will severely impact the maintenance and repairs to properties. If landlords are limited to a set amount of increase, they cannot pay for constantly increasing expenses such as insurance, utilities, and taxes. Landlords cannot and should not be forced to shoulder the burden of public housing, and the City has no business owning housing. Our community is not the right place to experiment with housing projects. There are nonprofit developers we should be working with to finance workforce housing instead of putting the burden on residents. As your Mayor, I will put the City back in its lane, seeking solutions to our water supply problem so that developers are not stopped from building more housing like they were the last time the City tried it.

Rent “stabilization” and control will drive landlords out of Monterey. This has been well documented in other cities. When a property owner cannot make it “pencil out” to rent, that housing unit gets sold, causing rents to increase to full market rates or being occupied or redeveloped by the new owner so we have even less rental housing available. The immediate effect of rent regulation is decreased budgets for maintenance and repairs. The long-term effect is less housing and worse affordability for our community’s working families. We need to protect our renters from the consequences of restrictive rental policies.