Larry Gross, Executive Director of the tenants rights group, The Coalition for Economic Survival says, "Most renters in L.A. are working people, low-income or middle class people trying to get by and rent control laws provide them with some stability. 62-percent of renters in L.A. are paying unaffordable rents as it is."
More than just capping rent increases, Gross says rent control gives tenants some of the security they would get if they were a homeowner because they know they can't be kicked out on a landlord's whim.
"It levels the playing field for tenants," said Gross. "It says you can't evict somebody just because you don't like them."
Gross says a more typical example of someone who has benefited from rent control is
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CES Tenant Leader Wendell Jones was facing eviction from his West Hollywood apartment, but fought the eviction and won under a rent control statue. He has lived in this one-bedroom apartment for 20 years. Photo: BENJAMIN BRAYFIELD/KPCC
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62 year-old Wendell Jones, who took us up several flights of stairs to visit his West Hollywood apartment on a recent afternoon.
"That's my exercise for the day," said Jones, panting. "I have chronic fatigue syndrome."
Jones has lived in his studio for about two decades and it's not hard to understand why: his rent is $700 a month, thanks to rent control.
West Hollywood is known as "the city built on rent control." It incorporated in 1984 largely for that purpose after a measure to win countywide rent control failed.
In area where studios easily go for twice what he's paying, Jones' sensed his landlord was eager to get him out so his apartment would reset to the market rate. Sure enough, when Jones got sick and fell slightly behind on his rent a couple years ago, he opened the mail and received a three-day eviction notice.
With help from the tenants rights' group, the Coalition for Economic Survival, Jones fought back. They discovered Jones' landlord hadn't been paying back the interest on the security deposit, as is required in West Hollywood, and Jones got to stay.
"Now things are relatively friendly with my landlord because they know I know lawyers, so they can't just come after me," Jones said.
There are plenty of people who would think it's unfair Jones pays $700 a month to live in West Hollywood - unfair to his landlord who could be making so much more and unfair to tenants at the mercy of market rates. But Jones doesn't think so. He says whether you support rent control or not all depends on what kind of city you want to live in.
"People like me who have things to share with the community, we'll all be driven out if rent control goes," said Jones. "None of us will be here. But if you think that people should be able to live their lives, landlords should be able to make decent profits, and we should all live together, we should all have rent control."
Jones has little doubt where he would be without rent control.
"I'd be homeless," he said
Local rent control laws watered down by the state
Gross helped campaign to bring rent control to West Hollywood and Los Angeles decades ago. He says as unaffordable as the rental market is now, it's still an improvement over what the market was like in 1970's, before rent control.
"It was a crisis situation," remembers Gross. "Speculators had found L.A., buying apartment buildings and turning them over. People were receiving three, four, and five rent increases per year."
Gross says although local rent control has helped many tenants in cities like L.A., Santa Monica, and West Hollywood, it has been consistently watered down by state laws.
"It could be a lot more effective," said Gross. "What rent control has done is limited rent gouging, protected tenants against unjust evictions, and preserved some of our affordable housing stock. But there's much too many loopholes in the law that allow property to escape."
In 1985, the legislature passed the Ellis Act, which allowed landlords to evict tenants if they go out of business.
A decade later, the state enacted the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, which prohibited any unit built after 1995 from being rent controlled and allowed landlords to charge market rents after apartments are vacated. The law didn't have much impact in L.A., where new units already reset to market rates, but it had a big effect in Santa Monica.
"We can't control our rent because of the Costa-Hawkins decision," Santa Monica 
planning commissioner Sue Himmelrich said. "That really is the pressure on our housing market.
There's been a big uptick in so-called Ellis Act evictions in the past decade in San Francisco. Gross says these kinds of evictions are on the rise in Los Angeles.
"We've lost upwards of anywhere from thirteen to sixteen thousand units through landlords going out of the rental market to demolish their buildings to build new luxury condos," said Gross. "Housing will be lost and never replaced."
