Delano Rent Control Office Broken Into

Arturo Rodriguez points to door of campaign office which was pried open “Looks to me like you have some sabotage happening,” he said.

By JOSE GASPAR

Suspicions are on the rise after the office a coalition of community groups uses to organize a rent control petition drive in Delano was broken into sometime between 6 p.m. Monday and noon Tuesday.

Arturo Rodriguez, communications director with Central Valley Empowerment Alliance, said whoever broke in did not take any electronic equipment, including two laptop computers, printers and a mobile hot spot. The only thing missing? A petition with about 22 voter signatures in favor of a proposed ordinance calling for rent control.

"Looks to me like you have some sabotage happening," Rodriguez said as a Delano police officer was taking down a report Tuesday afternoon.

Rodriguez said he arrived at the office in the 600 block of High Street around noon and discovered the front door had been pried open and the back door was left open as well, though it was not vandalized. Rodriguez said the majority of the other petitions, with some 500 voter signatures, were off-site.

"If they had taken those, there goes our whole campaign!" said a distressed and exasperated-sounding Rodriguez.

THE DRIVE

Rent control in Delano has been a brewing issue for more than a year. In April, the Delano City Council punted on the issue of imposing rent control, deciding instead to do a study about implementing such a measure.

In December, a coalition of community residents launched its own effort to bypass the council and appeal directly to the voters through a petition drive. Last week, I went to check on its progress.

Meeting at the campaign office, a group of about 10 volunteers received a one-hour training session on how to approach a home or apartment and what to say to renters. Known as the Fair Rents Delano campaign, it's a loose-knit group of folks called the Rural Justice Campaign. Its members young and not so young walk the streets and knock on doors. The goal is to get 3,000 valid voter signatures by May — more than enough to qualify the measure for the November ballot.

The training session broke up and it was time to pound the pavement. I followed three volunteers, Gloria Herrera, Irma Arredondo and Adriana Lopez, who took me to a neighborhood on Campania Drive in the northeast part of town, just south of the county line with Tulare County.

Fifty-year Delano resident Gloria Herrera collecting signatures

It was a beautiful, sunny day and the ladies got straight to it as Arredondo and Lopez knocked on the first home. Herrera, the more experienced of the three, stayed slightly behind to observe her colleagues. No one answered the door and we headed to another home. Then another, and another.

No one appeared to be at home, or perhaps someone was but they just didn't want to be bothered and didn't answer the doorbell as they saw us through their Ring camera. Maybe it's because people were still at work, as the time was around 3 p.m. The ladies were unfazed and determined to keep walking. This is important work to be done, they said.

Herrera has lived in Delano for more than 50 years and is in her 70s. Yet, she showed no sign of slowing down.

"I've seen older people looking for a place to live and they end up renting a room because that's all they can afford," Herrera said.

It's difficult to come up with solid data on rents in Delano.

"Rents are difficult to put a number on in that city," said Phillip Price, who appraises properties in Delano. "Every appraisal I do in Delano on income-producing investment properties, they're always constantly forecasting to increase these rents," said Price during a phone interview. "So, if they were currently at $1,600, they're going to throw in another $150 on top of that."

I wanted to know if renters in Delano were paying more for their housing today than in years past, so last week I undertook a very unscientific survey. I simply walked up to them and asked.

"Rents here are way too high," said Luz Bustamante, a mother of four children who has lived in Delano for 23 years. We chatted as she sat on a park bench babysitting her neighbor's 8-year-old daughter.

She and her husband struggled to find an affordable apartment in a decent part of town but could not find anything within their budget, so they moved into a double-wide trailer home.

Delano, like other communities in Kern County, suffers from an acute housing shortage, especially affordable housing for its most vulnerable population. There is much demand for housing and little supply.

The proposed ordinance would set a precedent in Kern County by capping rent increases to 60% of the annual change in the federal consumer price index, with a maximum annual increase limit of 3% applying specifically to multifamily units built before 1995, in accordance with the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, with some exceptions. It would also place new restrictions on landlords' ability to evict renters, along with new prohibitions on actions such as intimidation of tenants and bad-faith negotiations.

According to Rodriguez, with Central Valley Empowerment Alliance, the initiative targets corporate landowners.

"This isn't going to impact mom-and-pops who own a house or rent out accessory dwelling units. This would only impact apartments (and) condos in accordance with the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act," said Rodriguez.

But as expected, not everyone is on board with rent control in Delano.

Currently, the California Apartment Association, which is the nation’s largest statewide trade group representing owners, investors, developers, managers, and suppliers of rental homes and apartment communities, actively opposes rent control initiatives in five California cities, including four in the Bay Area and Delano.

Rhovy Lyn Antonio, senior vice president of local public affairs at CAA, is quoted on the association's website criticizing proposed rent-control ordinances such as the one circulating in Delano.

“Voters should not be fooled into signing these petitions," she stated on the website. "These measures are more of the same failed policies from overzealous actors seeking to undermine our state’s housing laws."

It's no surprise Delano is the only city in Kern County where residents have the fortitude to take on the powerful real estate industry. The birthplace of the farmworker labor movement, Delano has usually been a progressive city compared with the rest of Kern County.

"The farmworker struggle, in a way, was always about housing, always about people," Rodriguez said. "But today, the people, the campesinos, along with other working-class families, cannot afford to live in Delano anymore."

Despite the break-in at its campaign office, proponents of the proposed rent-control ordinance appear undeterred in their efforts. Caught unprepared for a break-in, the office did not have a security system.

"We're a poor people's campaign," said Rodriguez. "But now we'll install an alarm and a camera."

Contributing columnist Jose Gaspar is a former news anchor/reporter for Telemundo Bakersfield and KGET. Email him at elcompa29@gmail.com. The views expressed here are his own.