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Newsom signs bills to boost housing, provide more hotel shelter beds
VOL. 28,
NO. 186
Feds, state AGs claim tech firm enabled landlords to artificially raise rents
By Staff
By Joe Taglieri joet@beaconmedianews.com
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Gov. Gavin Newsom chats with a man experiencing homelessness, both seated, as officials observe in Fresno in 2022. | Photo courtesy of California Governor/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
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ov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday signed two bills to address homelessness that aim to help local governments add more shelter beds and facilitate the swifter construction of housing units. Assembly Bill 2835 eliminates the sunset date on tenancy rules that make it easier for service providers to place people experiencing homelessness into privately owned hotels and motels for more than 30 days. This approach has been proven to enhance stability for those in need. AB 3057 aims to streamline and "jumpstart" local governments' procedures for issuing building permits for "junior accessory dwelling units," or JADUs, in an effort to create more affordable
rental units statewide. An example of a junior accessory dwelling unit is the conversion of a singlefamily home's garage into a living space. “The homelessness crisis demands immediate and innovative action, not the status quo," Newsom said in a statement. "With these new laws, local governments have even more tools to provide housing. I urge them to fully utilize the state's unprecedented resources to address homelessness.” Local governments and service providers from private industry and the nonprofit sector throughout the state have successfully used hotels and motels to provide housing for people experiencing homelessness. The governor's office
noted that since 2019 when Newsom took office, the state has invested more than $27 billion to support local governments in providing services and housing to help prevent and end homelessness. Notable spending included $3.3 billion for the Homekey program, $1 billion in Encampment Resolution Funding and $4.85 billion in funding for the Homelessness Housing Assistance Program, officials said. Last year approximately 181,000 people experienced homelessness in California, with approximately 90,000 living in unsheltered scenarios, Newsom's office reported. The state funding aims to help local commuSee Housing Page 31
nities address unsheltered homelessness by utilizing rooms in hotels and motels to augment available shelter space. "This strategy not only creates additional safe and stable interim shelter for Californians experiencing homelessness but also helps ensure that service providers can more easily connect and support people with the services they need to access housing and exit homelessness permanently," according to the statement from Newsom's office. AB 2835 makes the use of motel and hotels to supplement shelter beds an indefinite option for local governments. “We need solutions to
he U.S. Department of Justice and eight state attorneys general, including California AG Rob Bonta, sued a technology company Friday for allegedly creating software that enables landlords to artificially raise rents — especially in Southern California. Landlords use RealPage Inc.'s revenue management software to price multifamily rental units. The federal lawsuit filed in the Middle District of North Carolina alleges RealPage enabled landlords to artificially raise rents by taking part in a pricing alignment scheme that raised rent revenue across the board, according to Bonta's office. The scheme allegedly was fueled by the illegal sharing of confidential pricing and supply information that affected residents of multifamily buildings in Orange County, Anaheim, Santa Ana, Irvine, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ontario, Rancho Cucamonga, Temecula, Murrieta, San Diego, Carlsbad and other parts of California. The lawsuit contends that Richardson, Texasbased RealPage harmed consumers by decreasing competition, limiting price negotiation and increasing prices in the rental housing industry, according to Bonta's office. “Anticompetitive agreements are illegal, whether See Rent Page 32
done by a human or software program," Bonta said in a statement. "RealPage misused private and sensitive consumer data to take the competition out of the rental industry, leaving renters no other choice but to pay the intentionally high prices that landlords agreed to set. This means that even if rental home supply was high, rent prices stayed the same, and in some cases, rents went up. This conduct is unacceptable and illegal, and given California’s current housing shortage and affordability crisis, it is causing real harm. Every day, millions of Californians worry about keeping a roof over their head and RealPage has directly made it more difficult to do so.” According to Bonta's office, RealPage's subscription-based software generates rent increases via algorithmic models intended to grow landlords’ revenue. "It does so by amassing competitively sensitive data from competing landlords through its pricing algorithms and sharing this data among subscribers," according to Bonta's office. "Landlords understand that their nonpublic data will be used to recommend prices not just for their own units, but also for competitors who use the programs. Landlords agree to provide this information because they understand they will benefit from the