Some council members are proposing and enforcement arm before any data suggesting if there actually is a problem. The rental registry request came from a city council colleagues memo about the Presidents Hotel. The idea that a rental registry would have stopped the eviction of renters at the presidents hotel is laughable. That appeared like a shady deal between City Manager Jim Keene and the developer. I bet you the number one reason going forward for evictions is not paying rent and developers redeveloping properties.

How about adding a renter's registry. We already know all the entities that own property. So let's have a registry of all the renters. Charge renters $25 per year. This can be used to verify residency for the school district. The city can keep track of renters that skip out not paying rent.

/marc

The more difficult and expensive you make it to be a landlord, the more expensive and difficult it becomes to be a tenant. Economic laws always apply, regardless of supposed good intentions.

The chance that Palo Alto will do anything useful and productive with this information is vanishingly slim. It will probably be used to further more socialist nonsense that will further restrict housing availability.

Any registry would contain highly sensitive data. A registry must be compliant with data security and privacy regulations, and the relevant regulations would likely extend beyond CCPA since citizens of EU, the KSA and so on can be landlords/tenants.

Chairman for life Xi would be very proud of the Palo Alto City Council for enacting the Rental Registry to track the renters and apartments. What kind of information the Council wants to track – vaccination status, where employed, race, religion, adjusted gross income, sexual preference, banking data, education levels, arrest records, what guests visit the apartment and more. All stored in city servers or the cloud where it can be easily hacked.

And then we can have a block monitor to report to the Council on all of the activities for each apartment in their assigned block. Xi will be happy with our socialism progress.

What is this?
The People's Republic of Berkeley?
Next up: rent control.

I am a renter. I am for the registry. I am also invested in our community as a renter, a parent volunteer, an employee and one who spends hard earned money here. I believe in rent stability. I am taxed to just not with private property. I'd like my comment to be represented here, as a renter and not a SFHO.

My family has rental property in Palo Alto, and I support gathering data through a registry. The suggestions that reporting requirements or a $50 annual fee would deter property owners from renting out their properties, or that passing on these fees to the renters would significantly affect affordability, are ludicrous. Rental rates are insanely high: even 1 bedroom, 1 bath houses are listed on zillow at $3k/month, so a $50 fee might increase rent by at most 0.1%, and no property owner is going to leave their house empty, leaving such sums on the table, to avoid filling out a 4 page form.

I think the council is making the right choice to defer the option of enforcement and focus instead on data collection. Otherwise the greater risk is people not responding honestly and the city getting false or incomplete data.

I'm also dubious of the notion that there's rampant renter abuse, given renter protection laws in place, but I admit that I don't have data to back up that belief. A registry will give all of us more data to make such determination. The comment above for a renter registry seems facetious, but the same, without a fee, would be useful to get information from both sides of the owner/renter relationship, and could serve as a statistical check on the owner-only provided data.

This is more process with neither problem nor purpose. Does this always have to be the Palo Alto way?

Council and the advocates should just get swivel chairs and fidget-spinners.

The landlord registry and its recent companion piece serve no purpose and they are unenforceable. The landlord registry was implemented over 20 years ago and hasn't got a foothold, and neither will this proposal. I hardly think Palo Alto has the cojones to test the waters in federal court after they get sued for depriving landlords and tenants their right to privacy. Wake me up in 20 years. PA will still be in the "planning phase" of this misguided trip to nowhere.

How about going for the low hanging fruit of housing currently unavailable to long term renters—the plethora of AirB&B and short term rental properties? The City knows these exist, and accepts the violation of ordinances prohibiting such uses. Why is that?

Meanwhile some greedy property owners rake in far more cash from short term rentals than from providing stable housing for folks who want and need to live here for work, for schools, for community. Every neighborhood is impacted. Neighbors know which houses are being used as short term vacation/business rentals. Report these to 311 as a violation of ordinance even without a wild party! Ask Council to address this issue!

I am NOT objecting to homes occupied by the owner which rent out space to guests or visitors. That seems like a reasonable compromise to help residents afford housing in this expensive city.

We have a problem with commentators who just graduated from college and lived in a student resident hall. Their view of an apartment is minimal. That view does not translate to a family with children. Young workers from other countries think a one room apartment is the soul saver. But are we designing our long-term goals for housing around young people who think a tiny apartment which is bigger then that they lived in before is good?

There needs to be transitional housing for the young workers who are single as well as older people with families and children. Then we have the older people who are empty nestors and looking to live in a senior community. We need to make sure we have a balance.