New York-based Blackstone has invested millions in California’s elections—and its homes

On Friday, a profile in the Intercept discussed the prominent role of Wall Street investment in the fight over rent control in California, including the part played by the private equity firm Blackstone, which has poured millions into defeating Proposition 10.

Glendale Tenants Union, a radical tenants rights advocacy group, has failed to collect barely less than half of the required signatures to get rent control on the November 2018 ballot. Glendale joins a list of other cities like Pasadena, Long Beach, Inglewood, and Santa Ana which have also failed to garner the required number of signatures to qualify for the November 2018 ballot. Here is a partial list of their onerous demands...

Evictions in California have been on the decline since 2008, contrary to popular belief. In fact, only 0.1% (calculated as number of evictions divided by population) of tenants are evicted in the Glendale-Burbank area. Glendale and Burbank have among the lowest eviction rates in the United States.

Here is the detailed data...

Today, 323.APARTMENTS launched video streaming as another method to resolve resident maintenance problems in real-time.

The 323.APARTMENTS video  streaming platform is based on WebRTC /SIP compliant transcoding, which runs within our maintenance request database. Residents do not need any upgrade or app to use the system.

Here is how it works ...

A state assembly committee voted Thursday [January 11, 2018] to reject a bill with broad implications for the ability of California cities to impose rent control restrictions on local landlords. The bill would have repealed the 1995 Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, which exempts newly constructed housing from rent control laws and prevents cities from limiting a landlord’s ability to raise rents on a unit after a tenant moves out.

323.APARTMENTS (formerly Admiral Realty) has average cumulative rent increases of only 2%.  Rent control imposed on 323.APARTMENTS properties would actually raise rent, not stabilize them as the law intends.  Rent control laws artificially control prices by ignoring tenant loyalty and market conditions.  A landlord is not allowed to offer rent discounts to long-term loyal residents because it will lose the right to raise the rent at a future date, since rent ceiling are in effect. Politically, the topic rent control is favored by tenants because they are led to believe that the law will keep their rents under control. However, tenants are not warned about the hazards of controlled pricing and its harmful effects on housing quality, neighborhood crime, and the ill effects from landlords who are forced to raise rents according to rent control timelines or be disallowed from raising rents later. Basically, rent control laws dictate when a landlord can raise rent, even if the economy is dismal. This means a landlord is forced to raise rent in poor economic conditions or otherwise lose the right in the future, when the market conditions improve. This type of pricing control discourages real estate investment and deteriorates cities.

What is Costa Hawkins?...

Researchers at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) examined rents and home prices in the 100 largest metro areas in the U.S. between 2012 and 2016. They found that a 10% increase in Airbnb listings leads to a 0.39% increase in rents and a 0.64% increase in house prices. By comparison, Admiral Realty average rent increase over the entire duration of a resident's occupancy is only 2% (on average). Rent control rent increase is about 5%. Admiral Realty strictly forbids room share hosting due to liability reasons and safety concerns from unknown non-qualified occupants.  However, this UCLA report suggests that apartment tenants who do engage in such activity are not only risking automatic eviction for breach of contract, but they are also cannibalizing their own homes by raising rents and pricing themselves out of the apartment building and neighborhood.

“That may sound minuscule, but between 2012 and 2016, rents rose by about 2.2% annually [on average in the 100 areas], so a 0.39% increase in that context isn’t very small at all,” says Edward Kung, an assistant professor of economics at the University of California Los Angeles and one of the study’s authors. The same is true for home prices, which rose by an average of about 4.8% annually in the 100 areas, he adds.