In the first year of Fremont’s rent review program, nearly half of those who sought help with rent increases saw them lowered, but some renters and city council members still don’t think the program goes far enough to help tenants.

The update on the program was presented by staff at the recent Fremont City Council meeting, where the council subsequently voted to make some minor tweaks to its rent review ordinance, but backed off of strengthening discrimination and retaliation protections for renters.

Councilwoman Jenny Kassan and Councilman Vinnie Bacon said they would have preferred to beef up those protections, and look at adopting rent control in the city, but the other five members of the council chose the status quo.

The city’s review ordinance is intended to help landlords and renters mediate disputes over rent increases. The council adopted the ordinance in fall 2017, and the program went into effect in 2018.

About 22,500 rental units in the city are eligible for the city’s review program, which encourages renters and landlords to work together to settle rent disputes that city staff can help with.

If that doesn’t work, the city offers a phone consultation, then in-person mediation. If none of those steps resolves the dispute, then a tenant who is facing a 5 percent or greater rent increase for the year can request a public hearing in front of a five-member rent review board.

However, the consultations and any recommendations from the board are non-binding, meaning the landlord does not have to honor them, which renters advocates say makes it ineffectual.

In the program’s first year, 71 people inquired about rent review services and 47 of them qualified. About 45 percent of the cases were resolved with a lowered rent increase. The average rent increase was about 11.5 percent and decreased to 8.7 percent after the process, staff said.

Only one person’s case made it as far as a board hearing.

Staff discovered several “limitations” and “challenges,” including fear of retaliation by landlords and discrimination against low-income renters, during the first year of running the program. Program managers offered eight potential solutions to address them, including adding a law to prevent landlords from discriminating against a potential tenant based on their source of income.

Currently, landlords can reject a tenant solely because they would use a subsidy to help pay rent, such as a Section 8, or Housing Choice Voucher, which staff said adds to the already difficult situation renters face when looking for affordable places to live in Fremont. According to a staff report which drew data from four rental listing sites, the average current rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Fremont is roughly $2,820.

The council voted against instituting such a law, which city staff said nine other cities and counties in California have adopted.

Another idea rejected by council would have attempted to limit retaliation against renters by requiring landlords to provide relocation assistance upon evicting someone, which could “act as a financial deterrent against eviction.” San Leandro, Mountain View and Berkeley currently have such rules in place.

Out of 47 rent-review cases, about 11 were never completed because the tenants feared retaliation or felt there wasn’t adequate protection from retaliation in the city’s law, staff reports said. The city’s ordinance includes a $2,000 penalty for landlords who retaliate against tenants, but the city doesn’t enforce it.

“There have also been tenants who reached out to the city to ask about the rent review process and intentionally did not request for a rent review because of the fear of retaliation,” a staff report said.

Bill Mulgrew, vice president of public affairs for the Rental Housing Association of Southern Alameda County, said layering “additional regulation” on landlords because a small number of people expressed fear of retaliation amounts to “nothing less than profiling,” and asked the council to reject it.

Mulgrew offered up a list of five of the eight solutions his association would be OK with, and those same five solutions are ultimately what Mayor Lily Mei, Vice Mayor Raj Salwan, Councilwoman Teresa Keng, and councilmen Rick Jones and Yang Shao supported. They included giving more authority to landlord representatives to raise and lower rents during mediation, and slightly expanding which kinds of rental units are eligible for the program.

“I am concerned that we were given a list of which items were supported by the rental Housing Association and and now we’re hearing that exact same list is what’s moving forward,” Kassan said.

“I don’t feel comfortable with that. I feel like we should trust our staff to know what needs to be done,” she said.

Bacon said the city should adopt just-cause eviction laws, requiring landlords to have good reason to evict a tenant, as well as “hardened rent control”, which he said would be simpler.

“There would be no need to arbitrate anything, it would just be there,” he said.

Mei and Jones both said that they didn’t want to make any major changes to the ordinance because the regional planning effort known as the CASA compact, and some state lawmakers, are pushing for rent caps, eviction protections, and other rent-control related legislation that may come into play very soon.

Chunchi Ma, of the Bay Area Homeowners Network, told the council the low number of people using the rent review services “shows that the housing situation in Fremont is largely under control, and most importantly, that the current rent mediation process works just as well.”

Annie Koruga, whose family are renters in Fremont, disagreed.

“Currently, we have a situation where rents go up, and Fremont residents are forced out of their communities, because we have no rent control ordinance calling for binding decisions, and we have a rent review board who makes optional rules,” Koruga said to the council.

“Landlords aren’t going to stop raising their rents because we ask very nicely,” Koruga said.