How The City Of Santa Ana Adopted A Rent Control Ordinance | Guests: Apartment Association Of OC

This is the Andres Segovia Show. Thank you, gentlemen, for joining the Andres Segovia Show. By all means, please let my audience know who you are and what you do. All right. I'm David Cordero. I'm the executive director of the Apartment Association of Orange County. Our association has been serving rental housing providers and industry suppliers for 60 years here at Orange County and also in parts of Riverside County. We're a great resource for housing providers who are looking for education, business referrals, business development opportunities and educational and legislative support services. We represent our members in cities where they own and operate rental property, as well as providing representation with state legislation up in Sacramento. And through our affiliation with the National Apartment Association, we also help to engage and provide the Orange and Riverside County perspective on federal housing issues through NAA and make sure that, you know, all of our lawmakers from the local level up to up to the national level understand the issues that are important to us and the issues that are of concern and how we as an industry can go about providing solutions that hopefully will bridge the gap between the rental community as well as those who own and operate the rental units themselves. Amen. Chip, thanks. Yeah, my name is Chip Allsweet, and I am the vice president of external affairs here at the Apartment Association of Orange County. My background comes from working with communities all over the country and trying to advocate for themselves with their local government, their state government, their federal government, and making sure that the community is well aware of what their issues are and how those issues impact the individuals throughout the community. Because what we've found throughout all of our efforts working in property rights and real estate and these kinds of issues is the number one core driver of any economic engine in a community is real estate. You don't have commercial without real estate. You don't have residential without real estate. You don't have retail without real estate. And that means making sure that there is affordable, reliable and safe housing for people on all economic levels. And we aim to ensure that that is possible. And we do that here at the Apartment Association with our members and with investors and people out there that are looking to make sure Orange County, Riverside County, and all the communities in Southern California are able to sustain that economic engine that makes each community great. I love the mission. And that's what more apartment associations, if they don't put down the mission statement, that should be their mission statement. Because honestly, property owners are not really aware of apartment associations being out there. I think the rise in tenant activism and tenant activist groups are way more outspoken. And property owners sometimes feel that they have to fend for themselves, not realizing that associations like yours do exist. I mean, you mentioned, David, you said they've got 60 years now? That's correct. And I never heard of the AALC up until about a couple of months ago when I received the mailer. And it wasn't from you guys. It came from the California Apartments Association. And that sent a letter on behalf of the new organization, specifically trying to address what was transpiring in Santa Ana for a while. You gentlemen are here on to discuss that rent control was coming and eventually was adopted by Santa Ana, the first city in Orange County to adopt such a measure. As on my program, I've warned repeatedly about that it was coming, despite the fact of AB 1482 being a statewide blanket rent cap. But when people hear rent control, I think that's the lack of education for a lot of people is they don't understand that it's not just a rent cap. When you get rent control or a stabilization ordinance of a city like Santa Ana or Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berkeley, and the like, we're talking about a new bureaucracy that's developed with sometimes executing with extreme prejudice control over property owners' properties. Ultimately, the end game being to basically take away the property from property owners. I actually manage most of all my property in Los Angeles. So just dealing with LA itself was something. So my father and I are investors. And when we had a chance to diversify finally out of LA some years ago, I'm like, let's look at some proper duplexes in Orange County. And we settled upon Santa Ana. Like, oh, great. I didn't know that would be the first dominant fall. And like, well, just by luck, we could have picked a neighboring city and it wouldn't have been the first because there were all these threats that looks like Santa Ana was going to be the strictest RSO in the state. And that's saying something when I deal with Los Angeles. So when I educate people about rent control, tenants, property owners, investors, and the like, it's like, it's not just a rent cap. I was talking with an investor this morning just about that. He was looking to buy a fourplex in Highland Park. And he said, I have to look into the jurisdiction of LA City there because if it's not the city, it'll be the county. Because Highland Park itself doesn't have rent control. But if LA has jurisdiction over it, then technically that means it would if they're incorporated into it. And if it's incorporated to LA, he's like, I never dealt with property that I'm buying where the rental rates were 50% below market rate. I'm like, yeah, that's by design. And if these tenants have been around for maybe a decade or two, they're going to feel they own the property. So they will have pushback. And not to mention the ever moving goalposts on the eviction moratorium. So there's things that people do not understand. So as we hone into this, as I discovered your association, as I was investigating to see who is present on the ground doing something. And I saw that your association was doing just that. CAA didn't respond to me. But Chip, you did. I appreciate that. I know that we've been trying to schedule this conversation or this recording. But you guys were really busy. I think you're trying to get a referendum to undo this RSO in Santa Ana, correct? Yeah. And let me touch on that briefly. And the people over at CAA, they were part of our coalition, as were the realtors, as were mobile home park owners, as was the Orange County Taxpayers Association, as was the Orange County Victims Organization, Crime Victims United. There was a large coalition of people that got together on this. And we were all working incredibly hard. And Andreas, you pointed out a lot of people don't think about the association as being something there for them. And realistically, this is what we do. David's background in community organizing and working with elected officials and governmental bodies goes back for decades. So does mine. We've had similar career paths. You mentioned Los Angeles. I had to deal with Los Angeles for a number of years because I used to run the Association of Realtors up that way. And yeah, these policies come up. And they all come, I'll be honest with you, they all come from a good-hearted place. The problem is when that thought process doesn't go from the good-hearted place, trying to do a good thing for people in need, and apply to, okay, what are the real-world down cycle effects? You know, you mentioned these people you're dealing with up in Highland Park have been in that property for decades. Well, in those decades, have their economic conditions changed? Have they been in a place where maybe they can afford to move out and let somebody more needy of a rent-controlled unit move in? Well, when you look up to Berkeley, we've seen that a lot of the units up in Berkeley have been occupied by professors since the 70s and before. So 50 years of being a professor, we've all seen how much tuition has gone up. It only stands to reason that professor's pay has gone up as well. And how many students or adjunct professors or even just the janitors for the University of California, Berkeley could have been better served by staying in those units rather than some professor who uses it as a weekday house while he goes back to Marin County. And there are countless examples of that out there. You know, rent control is an attempt to help people that are struggling. We get that. We have programs. We work with that. There are programs we endorse with that. We actually spend a lot of our time working with housing providers to help them understand how a lot of these programs can be very beneficial to them as housing providers. So we completely understand and support that mission. What we don't support is a mission that doesn't solve the problem. And what we've found repeatedly with rent control, just cause eviction, all of these ordinances is they're intended to help the person who's struggling. The person who's having difficulty. But they're gamed in the system by people who know how to game the system. And in gaming the system, they make the community less safe, less affordable, and less welcoming to everybody and not just the people that they were trying to help. You know, David, you had some great observations on some of the things you've seen happen in Santa Ana over the years and how we've seen it change. And is this the Santa Ana you remember us having? Yeah, I mean, Santa Ana has changed a lot. And Audrey, when you were talking about investing in Santa Ana and thinking this is a great opportunity for you and your interests, up until the last election, it probably was. And it really goes to show what one election can do to change the trajectory that a city might be headed in. Santa Ana has a majority rental community. And up until that point, the Apartment Association of Orange County was able to work well with city officials to address rental housing issues as they arose. We have a program that we helped design with the city going back, you know, 20, 25 years for proactive rental inspections of units that would allow quality housing to be assured and for the rental housing providers to be working with the city and maintaining communication in a beneficial way. With the change in the city council composition last November, that is what allowed this rent control issue to even rise to the level that didn't ultimately then, you know, be passed by the city council this past October. You have progressive thinking individuals that were getting into these decisions as policymakers and who oftentimes, if not, are sympathetic to the causes of tenant activist groups and renters. They're already in a position where they're looking to, you know, advance issues from a different perspective that work against solutions that bring both sides together. And unfortunately, in this case, our industry, you know, was not even brought into the discussion by city officials that rent control was even being considered. And I think that is, you know, for us, that is a hard thing to accept in so much as, you know, we have an entire industry here that provides affordable housing to a majority of rent or majority of residents within Santa Ana. And yet now they're looking to pass an ordinance that will handicap our housing providers, will not result in a lowering of rents, but simply impacting the amount that rent can be increased on an annual basis. The unfortunate thing is these rent caps that have now been established in Santa Ana, you know, they're not even allowing our housing providers to maintain rental levels or rent increases that keep up with inflation. And so now the problem is we're seeing an inability to keep up with inflation. The costs of doing this are going up as well, and yet the return on investment for our members and for rental housing providers in general is gonna be, you know, handicapped moving forward. And when you look at future investment in Santa Ana, you know, there's a lot of speculation. Are people going to want to invest in the city, buying rental properties, rehabbing rental properties, putting money when they know they're not going to be able to recoup a lot of their investment? And I think it's highly inappropriate for a city to basically set an arbitrary, you know, percentage increase that they deem to be a reasonable rate of return. It doesn't allow market forces to dictate how rents will move. And, you know, that's where it's troubling. And unfortunately, I think Santa Ana is certainly the first, but I'm not sure it's gonna be the last city in Orange County that is gonna be looking at these types of solutions for their own, you know, challenges or the rental communities that they represent. Yeah, absolutely. I think you got a really good point there, David. And that is that, you know, these policies come in and in the immediate, it doesn't seem like there's that much of an effect. I mean, so the rents aren't that far off. Well, I think we're gonna see effects a lot sooner than otherwise we would have expected because you're looking at a city that actually set their rent caps below the inflation rate, intentionally below the inflation rate in the same year that we have an inflation rate twice that of what we've had over the two previous years or any two previous years in the last 10. So we're looking at a situation where the costs just to operate the property are gonna go up really quickly. And those landlords are gonna have to make decisions of are we going to continue to provide services at the level we can and operate at a loss? Are we gonna incur more debt so that we can try to weather this storm? Or are we gonna have to cut some of the amenities we provide? And I think the really chicken thing about a lot of these city councils that pass this is they're doing it knowing full well in six years from now, they'll be out of office. Eight years from now, they'll be out of office. It's someone else's problem at that point, which is just weak-willed policymaking and poorly thought out policy advancement on the part of those tenants. Because who are they gonna go back to? Those politicians are long gone and joined some other office that they've run for. So who's left with it? It's investors like you. It's organizations like ours. It's the tenants themselves trying to figure out how to unwind a mess that wasn't thought out in the first place. And the thing with Santa Ana specifically, if the city had reached out to us before this ordinance was just introduced for council consideration going back to late September, we could have talked about possible solutions to address the affordability issue that they were so concerned about. There are programs out there that could have been utilized. There are opportunities for us to create something new specifically within Santa Ana. But that was not something that the city council and staff ever reached out to us to even begin to discuss. They simply said, we wanna do this rent control measure, this just cause eviction measure, and they made it so. And it's even questionable if they took these ordinance proposals and even did them correctly from the get-go. This is something that the full city council probably should have discussed in an open meeting before directing staff to come up with these ordinances. And that would have then allowed for more public input into the general issues that they were concerned about addressing rather than doing these proposals behind closed doors and then dropping it on the council and saying, here you go, let's vote on it. And unfortunately, we really felt like we were blindsided. We view ourselves, the association, our members, the larger rental housing community, as a partner with the cities and the communities that we own and operate our rentals in. And yet in this case, we were never even given a seat at the table when these issues were first even brought before city staff and council members to even look at. During the course of a couple of these council meetings, certain city council members made a point saying, well, we were looking at addressing housing issues in our city, you could have come to us with some ideas. But this is something that was generated by the city. If they had a proposal that they wanted to introduce, I think it's incumbent upon them to be reaching out to all the potential stakeholders that would be affected by these policies to weigh in. And yet that's not how they did it. It was completely backwards. And unfortunately, I think this is a reflection on how the new city of Santa Ana City Council is going to be doing things moving forward when it comes to establishing public policy moving forward. And that's very unfortunate. And I believe it's truly a disservice to the residents of Santa Ana and the businesses as well, who have invested in the city and have tried to make a commitment to being good partners with the local government. Absolutely. Because I did tune into the final city council meeting when they had to re-coordinate all this, I think it was late October. And I saw the property owners that have been there for some time go up there and make their grievances. How come everything we said on the fears, you guys didn't consult with us, you guys just literally ramming it through. And it almost seemed like the city council didn't care. And you said, oh, you guys should have come to the ideas. There they were saying, you guys didn't tell us about this. So it's like, how do we know unless you're doing it behind the scenes? And that was the whole intent. And as Chip, you mentioned, the whole thing, particularly because I'm most familiar with the lay born and raised area. It dealt with rent control in my professional life as a contractor with dealing with the RELs. And then as a real estate broker and property manager with my father. So rent control has been established in Los Angeles for decades. And the intent was to make housing affordable. The gotcha words, affordable housing, put a cap on rental rates and reduce homelessness. The opposite is true. The highest rents in the country, Los Angeles is the homelessness capital in the country and San Francisco, not that far behind. So these policies have fell for decades. Why are you even trying it again? The people voted rent control down when Proposition 10 reared its ugly head. And that thing shows up in so many different forms every single election cycle. But it was voted down by the majority. And I'm like, wow, there's a lot more rational people in California left. Thank God for that. But the legislators said, that's not good enough. So a few months later, in October 2019, that's when Governor Anderson signs AB 1482. Now, okay, stand my red cap. Who didn't see that coming? Because the tenant activists were mobilized just one month into the new year of that year to get this thing, at least on some way, somehow pushed through by the legislator in Sacramento. And then to see other cities being emboldened to go the rent control route. That's why I try to educate people. Even though there's a blanket statewide rent cap, it's not rent control in the sense that people think of it to be. And that's when I think the bigger pushback from property owners that are well aware of this and organizations like yourself that educate and advocate to find the proper solutions, because these things have failed every time they're tried. But the city just, or progressive ideals in dealing with property, just default over to that and don't always see reasons. Yes, the intentions are good, but good intentions do pave the road, in this case, to economic health. Because it hasn't worked out for LA or anywhere else that has implemented it. And that's my fear for Santa Ana, that it will become a dilapidated place. I'll be upfront with you guys that when we rented our first duplex in Santa Ana, we had the highest rental rates in the community. And I have property owners calling me, he's like, are you even getting people interested in being able to pay that? Would they be able to afford it? And when the tenants came over to check our units, you have luxury apartments here. It's like, well, we want a good commodity and we're offering it to the people. And then they outbid themselves to, that we'll pay you more rent for this unit. And we have very little turnover. I always tell property owners, this is a business. Look at it that way, where you got to do the 80-20 rule. 80% of your business comes from 20% of your clients. Good tenants will take care of your property. You will have less issues with your homeowner's insurance and things like that. And we want to sustain these relationships. That's why we have long-term tenancies. 15 years, 20 years. And they also understand this is not their property, but they take care of it as if it was their own home. And every opportunity we get, when some people come up and tell us that we want to be homeowners ourselves, excellent. We try to see how we can help them in certain ways to be able to like, hey, look, if you're moving in, if it's confirmed you're an escrow, we'll maybe forgive that one month's worth of rent so you can use it towards your deposit or whatever. It's a relationship. And I think that's where the communication has failed. But that's my concern with rent control not being there, that I don't know, at least for myself, I'm not interested in getting more properties in Santa Ana when I will have to deal with this. Because there was a scare in the letter that was being sent around. I got pushback from some commenters and tenant activists are telling me that the letter was incorrect. There is nothing spelled out in the eviction ordinance, the updated eviction ordinance that says that a criminal tenant have to be prosecuted by a DA. I'm sure that was brought up in some way. So I'm like, I did hear the conversations, but I didn't see it explicitly. And it's not spelled out in the ordinance. But what are the rumblings? I'm gonna toss this to you guys. Even if it's not spelled out, I know they can bring it on later. But is that a concern for property owners that if they have a troublesome tenant, just getting them off the property by police is not enough, they have to be prosecuted by the DA? There's a lot of uncertainty. And I'm gonna have Dave talk a little bit about this as well, because I know he and I have gone back and forth about what is happening here. In general, with a just cause eviction situation, you have to have an eyewitness and a conviction in order to get the person off. Well, who's the eyewitness? The tenant that has to live next to the person who's potentially being evicted, who's potentially a criminal, and be willing to be the person stepping out and saying, hey, I saw this guy do it. Is it gonna be the landlord who's there trying to work with the different tenants to provide housing opportunities and try to make sure that the community works well together? Is it the maintenance worker who has to see that person each and every day? Who wants to be the witness? Who can be the witness? Who reasonably should be the witness? Or, and this is the worst scary part if you ask me, is it the other tenant in the unit? Because one of the things that the tenants activist group pointed out, which we think is a nice attempt, is somebody who's a victim of domestic abuse. How do we protect them? That's a great question. You know how you can't protect them? By forcing them to be the witness against the person who just abused them. And if you get them out and you set it up so that the tenants can sign new people into the leases and they could just be forced to sign the person who abused them right back onto the lease. I mean, come on. It's just a not thought out process. And I think, you nailed it. How do you provide a community? You went through exactly what the reality of landlords is. And that is, they have a house that they provide. They bring someone in. They help them through the process. It's a relationship. The tenants activist group came out saying that they didn't want to be seen as a business. Okay, fine. You want to see us as evil landlords, but you don't want to be seen as part of a business. That's fine. But the reality is, it costs a landlord tons of money to evict someone. They have no interest in evicting someone. They want long-term tenants. They want a long-term relationship. They don't want to have situations where there's any sort of disharmony in their community and forcing there to be eyewitnesses going out and being willing to testify against their neighbor. That's not harmony in a unit. David, you had some good thoughts. Yeah, I think even looking beyond just the person who's been accused of committing a crime, you have potentially other people in that unit that perhaps are willing accomplices and have maybe not been the ones directly involved in creating a disruption or illegal activity at a rental community, but they've allowed it to go on and they're not addressing it within their family or within those who are residing within that unit, there's some culpability there as well. And for a rental housing provider who recognizes that, yeah, you maybe have the one bad actor who's been arrested or been accused of something or has been observed doing something, but there's not accountability for those who are also in the unit, well, then you can't get rid of any of them. And they're all ultimately contributing to some sort of illegal activity or disruption within the community that ultimately they should be able to then be evicted for. Now, again, it just puts it on one person. There has to be a conviction. Yes, there also has to be now someone willing to testify against that person. Bottom line, the Just Cause Eviction Law makes it more difficult for a landlord to responsibly manage and operate their property and maintain a safe and habitable and quality of life environment for all the other residents in that community. And I think that's the unfortunate thing is it's focusing on one instance, but yet there are more people than just that one unit that are involved. So whether or not the tenant activists are saying that this is necessary because landlords are just going to evict people who are struggling and are fighting back against rent increases or whatever the rationale is, here's the thing. Quality of life is going to be impacted, not only even within the rental community, but the neighborhood where it's located. And that has the snowball effect. It goes out into the greater Santa Ana community when you have multiple locations that are struggling with these types of issues. The protections that are already in place should be sufficient when it comes to the handling of evictions. We have state laws already dealing with this. There's not a need to make evictions more difficult in Santa Ana. And ultimately, that's what this is going to do. It's going to make it more difficult and it will have an impact on how our members and how rental housing providers in general will be able to operate their properties from this point forward. And it's not a positive direction, unfortunately. Yeah, and there's a- Let's be clear about something. Evictions are not an attempt to get more money from another person who's willing to pay more. That is not the purpose of an eviction. It never has been as far as I've ever been involved with the industry. And maybe in the Godfather, that was a way to make it work. In Godfather 2, the old, with Don Giuseppe, kicking out the poor old lady and her son with their puppy. That isn't reality. That's not why somebody does this. Evictions happen because there's a problem with the tenant. They're not paying their rent. They are causing disruptions for the neighbor. They are making it a bad place. That is where eviction is. Nobody wants to go through this. I mean, it's $20,000, $30,000 when you go through all the court fees up in Los Angeles to get someone out. That's a high expense. You then have to turn over the property. That's gonna be another several thousand dollars. So to the housing provider, it is immensely more expensive to evict somebody. They don't wanna go down that route. Everyone's afraid of eviction because of what it could mean for them. But you have to understand that's not the intent of the landlord. The purpose of eviction is to get rid of a bad actor. It's not to get more money out of the next tenant because it's gonna be a lot more expensive for you to even recoup the cost just to get rid of the first. So stop thinking about it in that perspective. Instead, look at it as how are you able to better provide quality housing for everybody in the community and not just the one person who's being impacted by their decisions? And I'll say one thing. There are always gonna be isolated incidents where you do have a landlord who isn't in alignment with what our industry standards and practices are and should be. There are gonna be bad actors. But those are isolated cases. And unfortunately, and we see this at all levels of government. Government is looking for solutions to problems that don't exist in the way that they're being characterized. And unfortunately, in the case in Santa Ana, if there is a situation where you have a landlord who's being a bad actor, there are remedies that could be used to address that on a case-by-case basis. Instead, this has become now a blanket solution for all rental housing providers. And it's unfairly impacting, I would say, 99% of our members and housing providers in the city who are doing things the right way, who are trying to be fair, who, again, like Chip was saying, aren't looking to have to go through an extensive eviction process that ends up costing them thousands upon thousands of dollars. That's the reality. And so it's not in their interest to be arbitrarily evicting people. They wanna keep these units filled. And Chip was mentioning a little while ago about so many of our members and others who have worked with their renters over the years. And I think, Andres, you were saying something about keeping rents low. We've had people who have been doing this. They've been working with their renters to make sure that their units can remain affordable. And they've perhaps been making a decision to keep their units under current market levels in order to be fair and to maintain a long-term residency. Now with the rent control ordinance having been passed and now taken effect, if you have an under-market unit that you've been doing out of goodwill and desires to keep affordable housing available for your renters, well, now you're stuck with a under-market unit that you're not now going to ever be able to bring up to current market levels with the current 3% cap that's been imposed. Yeah, absolutely. And all this is not whataboutism. Some people will hear these stories. And we didn't just come up with this out of the blue. So I was interviewed by a property management firm out in Massachusetts. And we were discussing rent control because just at the time when California did their statewide rent cap. So they brought me on. I was trying to give a cautionary tale for New Yorkers because they were trying to figure that out too. As a statewide rent controller anyway. So there's a particular story I was saving for this conversation because everything you just mentioned, this is happening right now. And this is in Los Angeles in the incorporated city of LA. So there's a multi-unit property that I manage with my father and the tenants are long-term tenants, but recent tenants, one of them is a section eight tenant. It's supposed to be just her. Her son, apparently, well, I don't know if it was institutionalized or just out of prison. Point is he showed up too. And that's not part of the agreement, especially with section eight. It's supposed to be an individual. But this individual ended up threatening our tenants, violently attacked some of them and was being very lewd to some of the kids that were there. And we had panic, frantic calls at 10 a.m. I'm telling you at the 10 p.m., middle of the night, 2 a.m., 3 a.m. calls say he's here. And us being located in Orange County, it's like, dude, well, it's not much that we can do per se, even though it's my father's property. He just got up in the middle of the night and went over there to see what he can do. Well, there's not much you can do as a property owner, but they said, well, this is your property. You can deal with it. But not with LA, we're shackled. So nothing much we can do there. In this case, the tenants have to be the ones to report to the police where they have been defunded and they have guests gone being the DA. This guy, the police show up, oh, we know who he is. We'll get him out of here. Where's the proof that he actually hit some of you guys? We can't just remove him for trespassing and things like that. It's not worth our while. And the last call, I think it was the third call that the police showed up, they just had to see him off the property and then they went their own merry way. They need to wait until he's a bigger fish to fry in order to be able to convict him because like, well, nothing we can do. We can book him and then release him. Nothing changes. So it's not worth their time. Our tenants are scared half to death about that. And this is not what about us, it happens. So just the fact that even if Santa Ana would be on par with that, and as I responded to those that gave me some pushback, like, oh, the CAA is lying about all that or exaggerating. I'm like, even if it's not spelled out in the eviction, that doesn't mean it won't be that way because anybody as though a rent control knows, like, well, that's just a basin. They just keep piling on it. And any other council member or another legislation could come along and just keep adding to this. And since we're running up on time, that leads me to what can property owners possibly see as being, besides education about this whole thing, but is there a chance to be able to put this on a referendum of sorts? What can be done about this? Well, we talked earlier about the effort that was undertaken once the ordinances took effect or were passed. We did have a 30-day window to try to qualify a referendum. The goal being to allow the voters of Santa Ana to decide whether or not they believe rent control and just cause eviction are policies that they want to be applied citywide. Unfortunately, we came up short in that 30-day window collecting the necessary number of valid signatures. But that's not to say that this issue is done. We are certainly, as a coalition of housing associations and business groups and others that are concerned about these policy issues in Santa Ana, we're looking at other approaches we can take to address it moving forward. Whether that's looking at changing the composition of the city council, we have elections that are coming up in 2022. That is always an option to really put efforts identifying candidates who might be better representatives of the entire city and understand and appreciate these particular issues as being important to revisit and perhaps change these laws that have recently taken effect. There's a possibility that maybe we come back and try to qualify an ordinance to overturn these measures on the ballot in 2022. That's another possibility where we would have more time to go out and gather the necessary number of signatures to qualify that for the ballot. And then there are other things we're looking at. I mean, this is not an issue that is done forever. We feel there are certainly concerns that remain. And I think as more people do become educated about the threats and the slippery slope that this type of legislation represents, they can recognize that, yeah, what starts representing or only affecting rental units could be expanded. And it could go to affect single family residencies that are being used as rentals or individual bedrooms in a home that are being rented out. You start down with one group being affected, but over time, the city council, I think, has that potential to make it even a more expansive policy that will take into effect more people in the city who own homes and are looking to maybe rent out units or have accessory dwelling units or anything like that. This is a problem. And we will continue to find ways to address it. And if we can overturn it through the vote of the people, that would be great. I also think it's really important for us to start telling the truth of what housing provider and the apartment industry and the rental housing industry, what they truly do. Andreas, you went through what is exactly the relationship between the housing provider and their tenants should be, what you guys are doing in Santa Ana, helping them along the way, understanding their needs, providing for them quality housing so they feel like they're living in a place that they can want to take care of while they set themselves up to the point where they want to move in and buy a house and a program that you set up where you help them make that down payment and work with them and give them those opportunities to create the institutional wealth that they're seeking in this industry and seeking for their families and seeking for their community. We need to start telling that story a little more. So, Andreas, I want to hear your story a lot more. I want anybody else out there that has similar stories. And I know that there are millions of them because in all the time I've spent working with housing providers, I've met some who I thought to myself, I don't want to work with that person. And I've met a whole lot more that make me think, wow, that is exactly what makes communities thrive is the relationship that person has with their tenants and with their neighborhoods and with their city. Because the truth of the matter is the only way we get people to understand that we're not kicking out the lady from the 1920s in New York in a story that was fictionalized intentionally to make someone look bad is by telling them what the reality truly is. We fix these problems by talking to one another. We're starting to change our messaging here at the Apartment Association. We're sharing some of these stories, some of these realities. One of the things we're going to be posting today is a comparison of inflation rates. Since 2010, inflation has been 27% over that entire time. The cost of housing, however, has gone up 89%. The cost of rents has gone up 31%. Yes, that is above what the overall inflation rate was, but marginally. We take a look at what the cost of a flight was in 2010 versus today, and it's wildly different. We take a look at the bumps up that are there, and yes, rents have gone up, but they haven't gone up commensurate with what they're costing. We need to show people that the reality is we need to see the truth of the matter, not the fictionalized story, not the made-up, organized group that shows up telling a story that is completely illegal, and everybody on the face of the earth knows is illegal, as did Tenants United through this entire program, saying that there were people being evicted and their rents were going up $500 a month each month consistently. It's just not even sensible that that could happen, let alone at a time when there was both a red freeze and an eviction moratorium. So the truth needs to get out there, and we need to have people like you telling your story. We need some of your listeners to give us a call, let us know. We need people watching this to say, hey, I see what the Apartment Association is doing. I saw their Instagram feed. I want to share it out with my people. Let's get that truth out there. Let's have that conversation so that people truly know what this industry is about and stop making legislation based off of stories that are completely unsubstantial. Absolutely. That's actually a really good point to end on. So I really appreciate that closer there, Chip. And before we close out, where can people learn more about AAOC? Well, the easiest way is to visit our website. It's www.aaoc.com. For those of you who are listening and viewing, who are on social media, our social media handle is at WeAreAAOC. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. And those are always the easiest ways to reach us. You can also give us a call, 714-245-9500. Or you can just shoot us an email. You just send it to info at aaoc.com. And a member of our team will get back to you and provide you whatever information you're looking for. We hold membership meetings throughout the year for our members. And we provide a lot of information on issues that are affecting them, whether it's dealing specifically on the rent control issue and just cause evictions in Santa Ana or other topics that are helping our members do their jobs to the best of their abilities. These are held on a monthly basis. And they can always, as a member, attend these meetings for free. And we have also educational programs that we offer throughout the year, again, aimed at helping our members do the jobs to the best of their ability and making sure that through the education, they are making sure that their operations are, in fact, compliant with local and state regulations and that they're aware of what the emerging threats are and that they're prepared and can address them in a way that will not hurt them and their business operations. And for the listener and the viewer, everything that David just spelled out will be available to show on the company's episode at www.newsagover.com. All links to their website will also be there as well. Now, gentlemen, we're going to wrap it up here for the listeners. But please, please do not hang up because I want to talk to you guys off camera. It's because if someone has a platform, I would love to also be a way to help signal boost a lot of what's coming up, especially as we take the fight to the city council and we continue to fight for property rights, for affordable housing, and, well, just to educate people ultimately, particularly in this case, the city of Santa Ana. So thank you so much, David and Chip, for joining me on the Andres Segovia Show. It's good to have you and you're welcome back on. Andres, thanks very much. We really do appreciate this opportunity to be here with you and your audience. Yes, thank you very much.