SBRSO

The Honest Case

The strongest argument for Santa Barbara's rent stabilization ordinance, made the way its advocates would make it — and why the evidence still says the mechanism fails the people it is meant to help.

Most writing about rent control is written to win. Advocates describe families saved from displacement and skip the buildings quietly leaving the rental market. Opponents recite Economics 101 and skip the tenant whose landlord just raised the rent forty percent. Both sides are describing something real. Neither is describing the whole thing.

This essay tries to do something different. It makes the case for rent stabilization as well as we can make it — not a caricature to be knocked down, but the argument a thoughtful tenant advocate would actually give, with the strongest evidence attached. Then it examines what happens when that policy meets the world, drawing on the best empirical work available: peer-reviewed, quasi-experimental studies from San Francisco, Cambridge, St. Paul, and Berlin. It describes what the evidence says would actually reduce rent burdens. And it ends with Santa Barbara's specific ordinance — Chapter 26.90 of the Municipal Code, released as a public review draft June 10, 2026, its program expected to be operative January 1, 2027 if adopted on schedule — and the particular design choices that make it, in our judgment, one of the most aggressive rent regulations in the modern American record.

We publish this knowing our sponsor, Radius Commercial Real Estate, represents multi-family property owners. That interest is disclosed on every page of this site. The argument below stands or falls on its sources, all of which are cited and most of which are downloadable. Read it as skeptically as you like. That is what it is for.

Part 1: The case for rent stabilization, made honestly

Begin with the numbers, because the numbers are not in dispute.

Roughly half of the renter households in the City of Santa Barbara — about 50 percent — are cost-burdened, meaning they spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent. Approximately one in four is severely burdened, spending more than half of everything they earn on housing [HUD CHAS/ACS via HACSB — Housing Authority of the City of Santa Barbara]. Countywide, the figures are worse: an estimated 62.5 percent of renter households cost-burdened [Housing Trust Fund of Santa Barbara County, 2018 data]. The city's own fair-housing analysis documents the same structural picture [City of Santa Barbara, 2020 — Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing]. And this is not a local anomaly so much as a local extreme of a national trend: the share of American families facing serious rent burdens grew substantially through the 2000s and 2010s [Pew Charitable Trusts, 2018 — American Families Face a Growing Rent Burden].

Sit with what "severely burdened" means. A household earning $70,000 — a teacher, a hotel worker and a home health aide, a retiree on a fixed pension — paying $3,000 a month in rent has almost nothing left after taxes for food, transportation, medical care, and any cushion against a bad month. For that household, a single large rent increase is not an inconvenience. It is an eviction notice with a grace period.

Displacement is the injury rent stabilization exists to prevent, and displacement is real. When a long-tenured renter is priced out, the loss is not just a unit — it is a specific life. Children change schools mid-year. A daughter who checked on her aging mother twice a week now lives in Ventura. A restaurant loses the line cook who could walk to work. Economists have a dry term for this — "neighborhood-specific capital" — and the crucial fact about it is that it is uninsurable. You can insure your car, your health, and your house against fire. You cannot buy insurance against your rent rising faster than your income. Markets for that protection simply do not exist, which is precisely the kind of gap — an incomplete market — that economists ordinarily accept as a legitimate basis for policy [Diamond, McQuade & Qian, 2019 — American Economic Review]. Rent stabilization, on this view, is social insurance: it lets tenants make long-term investments in a place — the same investments homeowners are subsidized to make — without the risk that those investments will be expropriated at lease renewal.

The advocate's second point is about power. In a market with vacancy rates persistently among the lowest in the country, the landlord-tenant relationship at renewal time is not a negotiation between equals. The landlord's worst case is a few weeks of vacancy in a market with a line of applicants. The tenant's worst case is uprooting a family in a city where there may be nothing else to rent at any comparable price. When one side can walk away easily and the other cannot, the price that emerges is not the textbook competitive price; it carries a premium extracted from the tenant's immobility. Price regulation, the argument runs, does not distort a competitive market here — it corrects an uncompetitive one.

Third, the advocate has an answer to the standard objection — "price controls reduce supply." What supply? Santa Barbara is hemmed in by the ocean, the mountains, the coastal zone, and decades of its own land-use decisions. The city is substantially built out. New multi-family construction arrives in trickles, and when it arrives it rents at prices no burdened household can touch. "Build more housing" has been the official answer for a generation, and the burdened half of the city's renters are still burdened. Supply-side solutions operate on a timescale of decades; displacement operates on a timescale of a sixty-day notice. A policy that protects people now, the advocate says, cannot be answered with a policy that helps hypothetical people in 2040.

Fourth — and this deserves emphasis, because opponents rarely concede it — the empirical evidence on rent control's core promise is favorable. The most rigorous modern study of rent control, conducted in San Francisco by Stanford economists, found that tenants covered by rent control were about 20 percent more likely to remain at their address, and that most of those who stayed would otherwise have been displaced from the city entirely [Diamond, McQuade & Qian, 2019 — American Economic Review]. Rent control does what its supporters say it does for the people it covers. Balanced reviews of the literature reach the same conclusion: incumbent tenants receive real, measurable benefits in stability and affordability [Rajasekaran, Treskon & Greene, 2019 — Urban Institute; Stacy et al., 2023 — Urban Institute]. Nor is the modern policy the 1943 caricature: today's "rent stabilization" allows annual increases, resets rents to market between tenancies under state law, and guarantees owners a fair return through a petition process. Advocates argue, reasonably, that critiques aimed at hard rent freezes are aimed at a policy nobody in Santa Barbara proposed.

That is the honest case: the burden is severe and documented; displacement destroys things markets cannot price; the bargaining table is tilted; supply relief is distant; and the best study we have confirms the policy protects the people it covers. A tenant advocate reading this section should find nothing missing and nothing softened. This is a serious argument, made in good faith, about a real emergency.

The question is not whether the problem is real. It is whether this instrument solves it — and who pays when it doesn't.

Part 2: Why the mechanism fails

Rent control is one of the few policy questions on which empirical economics speaks with something close to one voice — and, notably, the voice does not divide along ideological lines. The lead author of the San Francisco study, whose work documents rent control's benefits to incumbent tenants more carefully than any advocate ever has, summarized the field this way: rent control reduces the supply of rental housing and, in the long run, raises rents market-wide, undermining the policy's own goals [Diamond, 2018 — Brookings Institution]. What follows is the evidence behind that sentence — four natural experiments, four countries' worth of the same result.

San Francisco. The study that anchors the modern literature exploited an accident of policy design. San Francisco's 1979 rent control law exempted small multi-family buildings; a 1994 ballot initiative removed that exemption — but only for buildings constructed before 1980, leaving nearly identical post-1980 buildings uncontrolled. That is as close to a laboratory experiment as housing policy provides: two sets of similar buildings, similar tenants, one treated, one not. The findings ran in both directions, and both matter. Covered tenants stayed put — mobility fell roughly 20 percent, displacement from the city fell, and the benefit was real. But landlords of covered buildings reduced their supply of rental housing by about 15 percent — converting units to condominiums, redeveloping buildings into exempt new construction, and selling to owner-occupants. The lost rental supply raised rents citywide by an estimated 5.1 percent, a cost borne by every renter who moved to or within San Francisco afterward. And because the exiting stock was replaced by owner-occupied and high-end housing, the law shifted the city's housing toward higher-income occupants — in the authors' words, likely contributing to gentrification and inequality rather than restraining them. Their conclusion, in the flagship journal of American economics: the losses to future renters ultimately undermined the goals of the law [Diamond, McQuade & Qian, 2019 — American Economic Review].

Note the structure of that result, because it recurs everywhere: the policy pays incumbents with money taken from people who do not exist yet — future renters, arriving workers, the young. The transfer is invisible at enactment. It is collected over decades.

St. Paul. In November 2021, St. Paul, Minnesota passed by ballot measure the strictest rent control in the country at the time: a flat 3 percent annual cap, initially with no inflation adjustment and no exemption for new construction. Because the vote was a genuine surprise, it offers a clean measurement of what markets believe rent control does to property values. The answer arrived within months: residential property values fell 6–7 percent, an aggregate loss of roughly $1.6 billion, with about a third of the losses attributable to negative spillovers onto properties the law did not even cover [Ahern & Giacoletti, 2022 — NBER Working Paper 30083]. The study's most uncomfortable finding was distributional. Using parcel-level administrative data, the authors traced who gained and who lost: the tenants who gained the most had higher incomes and were more likely to be white, while the owners who lost the most had lower incomes and were more likely to be minorities. Their summary is worth quoting in spirit: to the extent rent control is intended to transfer wealth from high-income to low-income households, the realized impact was the opposite of its intention.

The supply response followed the script. St. Paul had permitted more than 2,000 new units per year in 2020–2021 — its strongest construction run since 1970, 96 percent of it multi-family. By 2024, after the cap, permits had collapsed to 404. The median apartment property lost 12.9 percent of its market value between 2020 and 2025 [Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, 2026]. The city's response is the most instructive part: it amended the ordinance in 2023 and by 2025 had exempted every building constructed after 2004 — a retreat that amounts to the policy's own authors conceding the mechanism [Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, 2022; 2026].

Berlin. In 2020 Berlin enacted the Mietendeckel, a hard five-year rent freeze with rollbacks — the strictest regulation attempted in a major Western city this century. Advertised rents in the regulated segment did fall; the policy "worked" in the narrowest sense. But while the freeze was in force, the supply of rental listings in Berlin fell by more than half, and rents in the unregulated satellite areas around the city — where displaced demand had to go — rose measurably [Hahn, Kholodilin, Waltl & Fongoni, 2024 — Management Science]. German landlords, like San Franciscan ones, sold, converted, and withheld. Germany's Federal Constitutional Court struck the law down in March 2021 — on federalism grounds, it should be said honestly, not economic ones — but fourteen months of data were enough to watch the mechanism operate in real time [Hahn et al., 2024; Sagner & Voigtländer — IW Köln; ifo Institute, 2021]. The supply response is not an American cultural quirk. It is arithmetic.

Cambridge. The evidence runs the other way, too. Cambridge, Massachusetts had stringent rent control until a 1995 statewide referendum abruptly ended it — another natural experiment, this time in removing control. Over the following decade, decontrol added roughly $2 billion to the value of Cambridge's housing stock — about a quarter of all residential appreciation in the city over the period — and, remarkably, more than half of that gain accrued to properties that had never been controlled, through spillovers: renovated neighboring buildings, reinvestment, restored neighborhood trajectories [Autor, Palmer & Pathak, 2014 — Journal of Political Economy]. Housing investment rose sharply after decontrol [Pollakowski, 2003 — Manhattan Institute Civic Report 36, an empirical study by an MIT housing economist]. Read in reverse, the finding is damning: for decades, rent control had been quietly taxing not just controlled buildings but entire neighborhoods, through deferred maintenance and suppressed investment that no one line-items but everyone lives with.

The mechanisms, assembled. Four settings, one pattern, five moving parts:

  1. Supply exit. Owners are not required to remain landlords. They convert, redevelop, sell to owner-occupants, or leave units empty. San Francisco lost 15 percent of covered rental supply; Berlin's listings halved; St. Paul's construction pipeline collapsed by four-fifths.
  2. Stock degradation. When revenue is capped below cost growth, maintenance becomes the residual — the only expense an owner can defer. The building absorbs the difference, slowly, invisibly, until it doesn't. Cambridge measured this in reverse: investment and neighborhood values surged when control ended.
  3. Misallocation. Controlled tenants rationally stay in units that no longer fit — the empty-nest couple in the three-bedroom, the long commute endured to keep the deal — while the families who need those units queue in a shrunken market. Reduced mobility is the same fact as the stability benefit, seen from the other side.
  4. A lottery, not a program. The benefit goes to whoever holds a covered lease when the music stops, regardless of need. St. Paul's parcel-level data showed the gains flowing to higher-income tenants and the losses to lower-income owners. No one would design an anti-poverty program this way; rent control is not designed, it is enacted.
  5. Instant capitalization. Markets price the future squeeze immediately — 6–7 percent off St. Paul property values within months — which means the wealth transfer happens at enactment, taken disproportionately from whoever happens to own the covered vintage of buildings, before a single tenancy changes.

The honest summary of the literature is not "rent control does nothing for tenants." It is this: rent control delivers real stability to incumbent tenants, and it pays for that benefit with the housing prospects of future renters, the balance sheets of an arbitrary set of current owners, and the physical condition of the buildings themselves — while pushing market-wide rents up, not down [Diamond, 2018 — Brookings; Rajasekaran et al., 2019 — Urban Institute; Stacy et al., 2023 — Urban Institute]. The policy does not eliminate the cost of the housing shortage. It relocates the cost onto the people least able to see it coming.

Part 3: What actually works

If the goal is what advocates say it is — lower rent burdens and fewer displacements, durably — the test of any policy is whether it moves those numbers. Here is what the evidence says does.

Supply, first and always. The most direct recent evidence comes from a Pew analysis of 1,654 ZIP codes: for every 10 percent increase in a ZIP code's housing supply between 2017 and 2023, rents grew roughly 5 percentage points less through 2024 — and the effect was strongest for older, more affordable units [Pew Charitable Trusts, 2025]. That last clause deserves italics because it inverts a common intuition. New market-rate buildings do not just serve the wealthy; they pull higher-income renters out of the older stock, releasing it down the income ladder — the process economists call filtering. New supply is how the pre-1995 workhorse apartment stays affordable. Choke off supply, and the competition for that older stock is precisely what drives its rents up.

By-right approval. In Santa Barbara, the binding constraint is less often land than process: years of discretionary review, hearings, appeals, and redesigns that add carrying cost and mortality risk to every project. Making code-compliant multi-family projects approvable by right — ministerially, on objective standards — is the single cheapest housing policy available, because it costs the city nothing but discretion.

ADU acceleration. Accessory dwelling units are the supply Santa Barbara can actually build this decade: small, distributed, invisible from the street, financed by homeowners rather than institutions, and added inside existing neighborhoods without a single rezoning fight. State law has already forced the door open; the city's opportunity is to make permitting, fees, and utility connections fast enough that thousands of owners walk through it.

Vouchers and income supports. If the problem is that specific households cannot afford rent, the honest instrument is money, targeted by income. Housing vouchers and rental assistance reach the severely burdened household directly — the housekeeper, not the software engineer who happens to hold a covered lease — and they place the cost of the safety net on the public budget, shared by all taxpayers, rather than levying it on whoever owns an apartment building with a pre-1995 certificate of occupancy. St. Paul's finding that rent control's transfers ran backward — regressive, poorly aimed — is the strongest argument for targeting [Ahern & Giacoletti, 2022 — NBER]. Vouchers are underfunded and waitlisted; that is a genuine problem, and fixing it costs visible money. But "the well-aimed tool is underfunded" is an argument for funding it, not for reaching for a mis-aimed one.

Protection at the moment of shock. Much of what tenants rationally fear can be addressed without regulating price year-round: just-cause eviction rules (Santa Barbara already has them — SBMC Chapter 26.50), relocation assistance for no-fault displacement, and emergency rental assistance that catches a household in the bad month. These target the event — the shock, the displacement — rather than freezing the entire price mechanism to insure against it.

None of this is quick, and honesty requires saying so. Supply compounds like interest: trivial in year one, decisive in year ten. Vouchers require appropriations that must be defended every budget cycle. This is exactly why rent control keeps winning elections — its benefits are immediate and visible, its costs deferred and diffuse, and research finds that even informing voters about the documented downsides only modestly dents support [Dolls, Schüle & Windsteiger, 2023 — CESifo]. Rent control is, in fiscal terms, off-budget borrowing: a benefit delivered today, charged to future renters and a narrow class of owners, with no line item anywhere. The alternatives are slower because they are honest about who pays.

Part 4: What Santa Barbara's specific ordinance gets uniquely wrong

Everything above concerns rent stabilization in general. Santa Barbara's ordinance is not general. Chapter 26.90, now a public review draft (June 10, 2026) — preceded by a temporary rent freeze, Ordinance 2026-6206, adopted January 27, 2026 and effective February 26, 2026 — combines several design choices that place it at the aggressive extreme of the policies the literature has studied. Six deserve the undecided reader's attention.

1. An increase formula that guarantees real erosion — by design. The ordinance's annual general adjustment is not the inflation rate. It is 60 percent of the April-to-April change in the California CPI, rounded to the nearest 0.25 percent, capped at 3 percent, floored at 0 percent [SBMC §26.90.020]. Run the arithmetic. At 3 percent inflation, the allowed increase is 1.75 percent. Compounded over a decade of ordinary 3-percent inflation, prices rise about 34 percent while allowed rents rise about 19 percent — a built-in real rent decline of roughly 11 percent every ten years, in the best case, before any of the owner's actual costs are considered. And the 3 percent ceiling binds whenever CPI exceeds 5 percent, which means the formula's gap yawns widest precisely in the years when insurance premiums, materials, and utilities spike hardest. St. Paul's flat 3 percent cap — the one that erased $1.6 billion in value and 80 percent of its construction pipeline — at least touched the inflation rate in a normal year. Santa Barbara's formula sits below inflation in every state of the world. Oregon's statewide cap is CPI plus 7 percent; most California ordinances allow 60–100 percent of CPI with higher ceilings. Santa Barbara's council selected one of the tightest formulas in the country (April 7, 2026, on a 4–3 vote) and attached it to the following five choices.

2. No banking. An owner who forgoes an increase — for a good long-term tenant, an elderly neighbor, a soft year — forfeits it permanently; unused adjustments may not be carried forward [SBMC §26.90.020]. Consider the incentive. Under a banking regime, forbearance is costless generosity. Under Chapter 26.90, forbearance is a permanent gift to the ordinance, ratcheting the owner's revenue base down forever. Every owner is now rationally compelled to take the maximum increase every January, including the many small owners who historically did not. The ordinance converts moderation into a penalty and calls the result stabilization.

3. The RUBS ban. The ordinance prohibits ratio utility billing — the pass-through of actual water, sewer, trash, and energy costs to the tenants who consume them. Utility costs are among the fastest-rising line items in Southern California operating budgets, and they are now locked entirely inside a revenue stream growing at 60 percent of CPI. This is a second wedge, stacked on the first: the formula guarantees revenue lags general inflation, and the RUBS ban guarantees a fast-inflating cost category can never be recovered at all. It also severs the last link between tenant consumption and tenant cost — the owner now pays for every marginal gallon during a drought.

4. Pre-1995 targeting — a tax on the naturally affordable stock. Coverage turns on whether a unit's certificate of occupancy issued before February 1, 1995 (single-family homes and condos are exempt unless corporately owned, per state law) [SBMC §26.90.010]. Think about which buildings those are. The pre-1995 stock is Santa Barbara's workhorse housing — the unglamorous 1960s and 70s eight-unit buildings that constitute the city's actual affordable inventory, the segment the Pew filtering evidence shows benefits most from healthy market dynamics [Pew, 2025]. It is also precisely the stock most exposed to the exit mechanisms San Francisco documented: old buildings are the ones that pencil for condo conversion, redevelopment, or sale to owner-occupants [Diamond, McQuade & Qian, 2019]. The ordinance systematically devalues and disinvests the cheapest half of the rental market while exempting the newest and most expensive — a targeting rule the empirical literature could have written as a cautionary hypothetical.

5. The retroactive baseline. Base rent under the ordinance is the rent in effect on December 16, 2025 — six weeks before the freeze ordinance was adopted and ten weeks before the freeze took effect [Ord. 2026-6206; SBMC Ch. 26.90 draft]. Owners who set lawful rents in January 2026 saw them unwound to a date in the past. Whatever one thinks of the equities, the market reads retroactivity as information: this jurisdiction will reach backward. St. Paul demonstrated how fast that kind of information capitalizes into property values — 6–7 percent within months, a third of it landing on property the law didn't even cover [Ahern & Giacoletti, 2022]. The baseline choice saved tenants at most a few weeks of increases and purchased, in exchange, a permanent regulatory-risk discount on every covered building in the city.

6. A safety valve that functions as a ratchet. The ordinance's answer to all of the above is the fair-return petition: an owner whose net operating income falls below its base-year level may petition for a special adjustment under the maintenance-of-net-operating-income (MNOI) standard [SBMC §26.90.050]. In practice, this relief is narrower than it sounds. The base year is fixed — calendar 2025 — so an owner whose NOI was depressed that year by a vacancy, a re-roof, or a below-market legacy tenancy locks in that depressed figure as their permanent benchmark. The standard preserves a historical income number, not a fair return on the property's value, and reaching even that requires an owner-initiated, building-by-building petition supported by years of documented operating data, argued before a hearing officer — a process whose cost and complexity deter exactly the small owners who dominate this stock. Meanwhile the city projects roughly $2 million per year, about $154 per covered unit, simply to administer the program [City of Santa Barbara staff report, May 19, 2026] — while the record contains no economic-impact analysis of the ordinance itself, an absence noted by the city's own officials. The escape valve is real in the way a door at the top of a wall is real.

The rent burden in Santa Barbara is severe, and the people bearing it deserve better than slogans — from either direction. What the evidence shows, from San Francisco to St. Paul to Berlin to Cambridge, is that rent control reliably delivers stability to the tenants it covers and reliably charges the bill to future renters, to the owners of an arbitrary vintage of buildings, and to the buildings themselves — while the underlying shortage grows. Santa Barbara has now frozen rents and drafted a permanent version of this policy with a below-inflation formula, no banking, no utility recovery, retroactive reach, and a safety valve small owners cannot practically use, aimed at the most affordable housing the city has.

The predictions in the literature are specific: supply exit, disinvestment, capitalized value losses, and rising market rents for everyone the ordinance doesn't cover. This site exists to measure whether they come true here. We will publish what we find — including the findings that cut against us.

Sources

All sources below are cataloged, with local PDFs where available, in this site's research bibliography. Bracketed citations in the text map to the entries here.

Peer-reviewed causal studies

  • Diamond, Rebecca, Tim McQuade & Franklin Qian (2019). "The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco." American Economic Review 109(9): 3365–3394. [Free working paper: Stanford/NBER WP 24181.]
  • Autor, David H., Christopher J. Palmer & Parag A. Pathak (2014). "Housing Market Spillovers: Evidence from the End of Rent Control in Cambridge, Massachusetts." Journal of Political Economy 122(3): 661–717. [NBER WP 18125.]
  • Ahern, Kenneth R. & Marco Giacoletti (2022). "Robbing Peter to Pay Paul? The Redistribution of Wealth Caused by Rent Control." NBER Working Paper 30083.
  • Hahn, Anja M., Konstantin A. Kholodilin, Sofie R. Waltl & Marco Fongoni (2024). "Forward to the Past: Short-Term Effects of the Rent Freeze in Berlin." Management Science. [DIW Berlin Discussion Paper 1928.]

Official and institutional analyses

  • Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (2022). "An Overview of Rent Stabilization from National Housing Experts." (2026). "Housing Policies in Saint Paul Yield Mixed Results, Data and Developers Say."
  • Diamond, Rebecca (2018). "What Does Economic Evidence Tell Us About the Effects of Rent Control?" Brookings Institution.
  • Rajasekaran, Prasanna, Mark Treskon & Solomon Greene (2019). "Rent Control: What Does the Research Tell Us About the Effectiveness of Local Action?" Urban Institute.
  • Stacy, Christina Plerhoples, et al. (2023). "Rent Control: Key Policy Components and Their Equity Implications." Urban Institute.
  • Pollakowski, Henry O. (2003). "Rent Control and Housing Investment: Evidence from Deregulation in Cambridge, Massachusetts." Manhattan Institute, Civic Report 36. (Market-oriented publisher; empirical study by an MIT housing economist.)
  • Sagner, Pekka & Michael Voigtländer. "How the Berlin Rent Cap Affected Private Landlords." IW Köln (German Economic Institute); ifo Institute (2021), "Ein Jahr Mietendeckel."
  • Dolls, Mathias, Paul Schüle & Lisa Windsteiger (2023). "Affecting Public Support for Economic Policies: Evidence from a Survey Experiment about Rent Control in Germany." CESifo Working Paper 10493.

Rent burden and supply

  • Pew Charitable Trusts (2018). "American Families Face a Growing Rent Burden."
  • Pew Charitable Trusts (2025). "New Housing Slows Rent Growth Most for Older, More Affordable Units."
  • Housing Authority of the City of Santa Barbara (HACSB), "Who Can Afford 'Affordable Housing' in Santa Barbara?" (HUD CHAS/ACS data.)
  • Housing Trust Fund of Santa Barbara County, county cost-burden data (HUD CHAS, 2018 / ACS 2021).
  • City of Santa Barbara (2020). "Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing."

Primary ordinance documents (this site's C1 archive)

  • SBMC Chapter 26.90 (Rent Stabilization), public review draft, June 10, 2026 — coverage (§26.90.010), CPI definition and annual general adjustment (§26.90.020), fair-return petitions (§26.90.050), capital-improvement petitions (§26.90.060).
  • Ordinance 2026-6206 (temporary rent-increase moratorium), adopted January 27, 2026; effective February 26, 2026; base rent set at December 16, 2025 levels.
  • SBMC Chapter 26.50 (Just Cause for Residential Evictions).
  • City of Santa Barbara Council staff report, May 19, 2026, Item 10 — RSG rent-stabilization program cost estimate (~$2M/year, ~13,000 units).

Published by SBRSO — the Santa Barbara Rent Stabilization Observatory, an independent research project powered by Radius Commercial Real Estate. Radius represents multi-family property owners in the Santa Barbara market; this interest is disclosed on every page. Corrections: see our corrections policy.