Struggling to curb displacement in a city that is now the fourth most expensive rental market in the nation, the Oakland City Council approved two proposals early Wednesday that would sharply limit property owners’ ability to raise rents.

Before voting to back the measures, however, the council sat through hours of at times raucous debate between housing activists and small property owners, who argued about whether stronger rent control would slow gentrification in Oakland and whether that was a worthwhile goal.

Many supporters of capping rent increases and extending eviction controls said Oakland’s long-awaited economic boom is benefiting newcomers but hurting people whose families have lived there for generations. “Longtime Oakland residents are getting pushed out at precisely the moment when opportunity is increasing,” said Angela Glover Blackwell, president of the social equity research institute PolicyLink.

Opponents of the rent control measures said they unfairly penalized small property owners.

“Not all landlords are from the Donald Trump school of vindictive and irresponsible business practices, yet it seems as though you have painted such a picture,” said Doug Sager, president of the Oakland-Berkeley Association of Realtors. He urged the council to abandon the two proposals and instead focus on building more affordable housing.

Billed as companion measures, both proposals require landlords to petition for approval of any annual rent hike of more than 10 percent. Oakland’s current laws put the burden for challenges to such increases on tenants, forcing them to show why property owners are not entitled to them.

In addition, each proposal includes several tenant protections.

One of the measures, which will take effect immediately pending a second reading next week, will limit the amount that property owners can charge their tenants for capital improvements to a building.

That drew criticism from Jill Broadhurst, head of the East Bay Rental Housing Association, a trade group representing landlords.

“We’re being cut to the point where owners will no longer be able to take care of their properties,” Broadhurst said.

The measure also requires buyers of duplexes and triplexes to live in their buildings for at least two years before those buildings are exempt from rent control. The council vote approving the measure was 7-0, with Councilwoman Desley Brooks abstaining.

The second measure would expand the city’s just-cause eviction law to homes built after 1995, meaning that owners of those buildings could evict tenants only for violating the terms of a lease, or by virtue of the state Ellis Act, which allows property owners to leave the rental business. The council voted 8-0 to put the measure before voters in November.

Neither meaure would apply to rents in buildings constructed after 1983, which are exempted under a state law that restricts local rent controls.

Councilman Dan Kalb said the measures were designed to rein in a small pool of venal landlords, and said the vast majority of mom-and-pop property owners are decent people trying to run a business.

“By and large, most landlords neither abuse their tenants nor impose unfair rent increases,” Kalb said. “Nevertheless, given the incentive they have to raise rents, and the fact that there are some unscrupulous landlords, we have a strong incentive to enforce tenant protections.”