By Camas Frank

San Luis Obispo plans to get serious about making sure rental housing is up to snuff on May 5 the city council could take the first step towards enacting a new rental housing inspection program.
With several homeowner and neighborhood associations making their concern about the ratios of rental vs. owner-occupied homes a political issue during the last municipal election, and safety of housing stock identified as a city goal in the last budget, months of staff time have gone into setting up code enforcement mechanisms.
In the 2010 census, 62 percent of SLO’s housing was identified as “rental property.”
By February of this year a consumer finance website had run the numbers using newer stats, upping the percentage to 63.3% of residents that rent rather than own their residences, “meaning it is 22.3 times cheaper to rent than buy here.”
The publication, NerdWallet’s conclusion came counter to the preferences of existing homeowners and elected leaders, who’d like more permanent residents to move into town.
The advice website named SLO No. 14 on its “Best Cities to Rent, Not Buy in Southern California” list. Being lumped in with Southern California, indeed only Los Angeles competes with SLO with a high disparity in rentals and ownership, also isn’t the image projected for the Central Coast by the local Chamber of Commerce and various Tourism Business Improvement Districts.
While the safety of rental units, and sending City workers to each of the City’s approximately 4,000 rental properties on a 3-year rotation, may not seem connected to those numbers, there is some thinking that what’s good for one will help the other.
Upping safety standards and eliminating illegal multi-unit conversions, such as garage apartments and attic bedrooms, may even out the playing field in a lopsided market.
City Councilman John Ashbaugh was one proponent of this view at the meeting that directed staff to flush out the details of the ordinance. During debate he expressed his belief that, rather than the $98 per year fee for inspection being a hindrance to affordability, it would even the playing field of landlords.
The logic being that even if the new cost of doing business is passed onto tenants, the product sold will at least be of a baseline quality and prevent shortcuts to either increase profit or reduce cost.
It is unknown what exact market effect the fees and knowledge that units will be inspected for building and safety code violations could be in an area where students are known to pay $700-$1,000 each, per room of a shared house.
However, for the Community Development Department the goal is simple and the program well laid out with precedent from at least 25 other cities used as examples.
“You could say it’s increasing standards, but what it is really bringing some units up to just a bare minimum,” Community Development Director Derek Johnson said, noting that inspectors would check for safety issues that shouldn’t exist to begin with.
Speaking outside after giving a presentation to the San Luis Obispo Property and Business Owners Association, Johnson said that many people living in unsafe conditions are too fearful of losing their only accommodation to report to the City.
The most well-known case of violations flying under the radar involved at the Pine Creek condominiums when several residents ended up in the hospital after sleeping near unvented gas appliances.
While that case involved an apartment block already subject to fire and safety inspections, Johnson said the case study of several homes, which Cal Poly purchased near campus, and invited the City to tour, revealed, “serialized misuse of uninhabitable spaces.”
The landlords and property owners at the meeting were skeptical of the inspections targeting their properties and business practices, which they would also have to pay for, they asked some questions which many renters might have wondered about as well.
For instance, what about the legitimacy of municipal employees entering units without a search warrant? After all, consent from the person living in a house is also an issue and while a landlord is entitled access to property under certain reasonable conditions, a college-aged individual might bristle at government agents coming into his or her room.
A final draft of the ordinance is still being looked over by the City Attorney before presentation to the City Council, said Building and Safety Supervisor Rafael Cornejo. California law is pretty clear that its “OK,” he said, as long as the City isn’t there to go snooping for anything other than the building code on their check list.
“The ‘What?’ and ‘How?’ of what we’re doing is all addressed in the draft we’d prepared before the last presentation,” he said. “We’ve just had to explain and what we’re doing now is streamlining the wording.”
What about something like a pot plant growing in a house? Cornejo said the inspectors would be “ordered to ignore” such minutiae of people’s lives that does “not have to do with the purpose of the visit.”
Besides that, just finding out which houses to include in a database for an inspection program has been a full time job, adding criminal law enforcement to the work not only be more than was asked of them but impractical as well.
“We’re not here to judge your life,” Johnson said, “just to address immediate health and safety issues.”
The database of more than 4,000 addresses inside the City Limits was amassed using business licenses filed for the rentals, frequent change of address forms, and utility bills along with some other tracking methods. Johnson said that for the sake of logistics, and putting together an accurate list, rental units with an owner living on the property as well, were dropped from the ordinance.
“They [three full-time inspectors and a supervisor] will be out there working every day,” said Cornejo, “but you won’t see them except for once every three years.”