SAN JOSE — With city officials considering tougher rent controls next month, a labor group Thursday released a study that showed rents in the city have risen nearly four times faster than wages.

“It’s hurting our working families and seniors here in San Jose,” said Jeffrey Buchanan, policy director at Working Partnerships USA, a labor think tank that produced the report. “A growing tech sector has created thousands of jobs, but it’s also pushed the demand for housing with rents rising much too rapidly for our working families to be able to keep up.”

The San Jose City Council on November 14 will consider strengthening the city’s rent control law, which covers nearly 46,000 apartments citywide — about a third of San Jose’s rental housing stock. Amid unprecedented outcry from renters struggling to survive the Silicon Valley housing crisis, the council last year reduced allowable rent increases from 8 percent to 5 percent per year.

Prior to the change, landlords could have “banked” unused increases to raise rent by up to 21 percent.

But some advocates said the rent control changes didn’t go far enough. They demanded the San Jose council next month approve a proposal to tie rent hikes to cost of living — which has increased anywhere from 0.7 percent to 2.8 percent over the last six years. The allowable rent hikes would be capped at no more than 5 percent.

A similar proposal to tie rent control increases to inflation fell flat last year. Advocates are hoping to revive it this year.

The Working Partnerships report, “Soaring Rents, Falling Wages,” said the gap between wages and rent affordability is nearly three times what it was in 2009. Renters, it said, would need to earn nearly $3,000 more a month to afford an average apartment in San Jose, citing data from the U.S. Census Bureau and Costar, a data server that tracks rents.

But Joshua Howard, senior vice president of the California Apartment Association, argued that the figures used in the new study are “misleading.”

Howard said the report used rent figures from all apartments citywide — not just those under rent control — and apartments that are vacant, which tend to be pricier than occupied units.

“This is another propaganda piece being used to promote rent control,” Howard said. “It’s not a fair data set because it’s looking at rents that are not under rent control. Those units tend to be newer and have different amenities.”

But housing advocates, citing the report, said U.S. Census data shows that most San Jose families earning less than $50,000 a year are “extremely rent budened” — meaning 57% of their income goes to rent. They fear that it will only get worse if Google builds its massive new tech campus in downtown San Jose.

Frances Rivera, a mother of two who joined labor and housing advocates at City Hall to unveil the report, saw her rent increase by $118 a month, despite living in a rent-controlled unit. At the same time, her son’s hours at work were reduced, decreasing their monthly income by $200.

“It doesn’t take an accountant to see that these numbers don’t balance out,” Rivera said. “The impact on my family is that there will be less food on the table and our PG&E bill will be outstanding.”