When Jeramie Andehueson and his husband, Andrew, moved into a two-bedroom apartment in the quiet East Bay city of Alameda last year, they thought they’d laid a blueprint for the next 20 years of their lives.

Jeramie Andehueson, a hairdresser, and Andrew Andehueson, general manager of a Starbucks, joined a local wine club, showed up to neighborhood charity fundraisers and planned on raising a family.

Then on Nov. 3, the couple came home to find an eviction notice tacked on their door.

“We’d done nothing wrong,” said Jeramie Andehueson, who found out, shortly thereafter, that the landlord of his building had set rent at $2,300 a month for two vacant two-bedroom apartments upstairs — higher than the Andehuesons’ rent of $1,925 a month.

The next night, crowds of housing activists flocked to a special City Council hearing to address the city’s housing crisis. The raucous seven-hour hearing ended with two arrests and a 65-day moratorium on no-cause evictions and rent increases above 8 percent.

The council’s action didn’t come in time to help the Andehuesons, who expect to move out of their apartment in February. But it buys city leaders time to seek long-term relief for residents of the small city who say they’re under siege by greedy landlords.

The impact of rising rents has become a wrenching topic in Alameda, a city of 75,000 where 55 percent of residents rent their homes. It seems that everyone knows someone who has received a no-cause eviction or an excessive rent increase, said the city’s Mayor Trish Spencer, herself a tenant for 16 years.

Days after the city passed its moratorium, 34 households in one apartment complex received eviction notices, said Councilman Tony Daysog.

“Property values are surging, and landlords are reaping the benefits of that,” said Dean Preston, head of the tenants rights group Tenants Together, based in San Francisco.

Back to Gallery Tension builds in Alameda over fast-rising rents 2 1 of 2 Photo: Leah Millis, The Chronicle 2 of 2 Photo: Leah Millis, The Chronicle



Ballooning rents have met a groundswell of opposition in many Bay Area cities, Preston said, including San Mateo, Santa Rosa, Mountain View, San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland, Richmond, and now, Alameda.

Violence at council meeting

But in Alameda, what might seem like the obvious solution — regulation — has become so contentious that it caused blood to spill at the Nov. 4 council meeting, where a police officer tackled 68-year-old tenant advocate Bob Davis to the ground, leaving a bloody trail on the floor. Davis, who was among a throng of people attempting to push their way into the meeting, allegedly dragged Public Works Director Bob Haun to the floor, causing Haun to break his hip.

“I go to the store, and people are talking about rents and housing,” said Catherine Pauling, coordinator of the Alameda Renters Coalition, a group that is pushing for rent control and protection from evictions. People live in constant fear that they’ll come home to find an “Order to Vacate” notice on the door, Pauling said.

In July, the average monthly rent in Alameda was $2,251, up significantly from $1,737 in July of 2013, according to the data site RealFacts.

Activists from the renters coalition are begging for rent control, but some officials fear that any attempt to stabilize rents would unfairly penalize the mom-and-pop landlords who rely on the extra income for their retirement.

“We have a lot of them,” said Spencer, the city’s mayor. “If you look at the ones who attended that meeting (on Nov. 4), they’re older, they might have a couple homes or a duplex, and they talk about it being their retirement.”

One such landlord, Karin Lucas, said at the meeting that a rent control law would erode the relationship she has with her tenants.

“Many other property owners feel the same,” Lucas said. “We take care of our small, older properties, and try to treat our tenants fairly.”

Regulations considered

Spencer opposes setting a limit on rent increases, but says she’d support a law that empowered the city’s Rent Review Advisory Committee to set limits on individual rents. The committee can suggest rent caps through a mediation process, but its decisions aren’t binding.

Other council members have their own proposals. Councilman Frank Matarrese wants to lobby the state for more tax credits to build affordable housing, and tax deductions for renters. Daysog is pressing for a law that would require landlords to assist the tenants they evict, perhaps with a direct deposit and two months’ rent on a new apartment.

Daysog sees relocation assistance as “compensation to help families get through that painful experience.”

Compensation is used in San Francisco, where the law requires landlords to pay $4,500 to tenants in no-fault evictions. Elderly and disabled tenants or parents with children are entitled to an additional $3,000.

But Councilman Jim Oddie said that paying people to leave their homes amounts to social cleansing.

“I don’t like the idea that if you get a 60-day notice, you have to leave the island,” Oddie said. He wants the city to hold mandatory binding arbitration for any rent increase above 8 percent.

The city’s population increased by 6.1 percent in the past 15 years, first with a wave of first-time home buyers who replaced many of the elderly longtime residents, and more recently with younger renters, said Daysog, who grew up on the island’s west end.

‘Where hipsters come to die’

“It’s where hipsters come to die — after you’ve had your fun in Oakland or San Francisco, you come to Alameda,” Daysog said. “It’s becoming the literal home of Pixar employees who work in Emeryville.”

But the city’s housing supply hasn’t kept pace, owing partly to a ballot measure that voters passed in 1973 that restricted construction of multifamily homes. The idea behind Measure A was to preserve the island’s small-town character.

Jeramie Andehueson said he might be willing to pay $2,300 a month in rent if that’s what it takes to stay in Alameda — even though the increase might require working longer hours, or ditching the wine club.

“We’re pretty set on staying in Alameda,” he said. “We’ve gone to community events, we’ve established our social repertoire here, we want to raise a family. I don’t see why we should leave.”

Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan