There's got to be a middle ground-- something in between protecting renters from callous landlords and unfair rents and developing an overly difficult system that prevents new housing advancement.
Caught in the tug of war is the
Albuquerque City Council, as tenants reckon with rental spikes and the city considers a rental scarcity of about 13,000 units.
An annual State of the Nation's Housing report from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies found
Albuquerque's rents were increasing at a rate of 18% year over year, well above the national average of 12%.
"Rent is going crazy. It's causing individuals to become unhoused," said
Albuquerque City Councilor Tammy Fiebelkorn, who has unsuccessfully provided two tenant defense costs in current months.
One of Fiebelkorn's propositions, the creation of a property manager registry, would have been extremely challenging. It would have needed the city to track the number, accessibility and expense of apartments and other domestic rentals in
Albuquerque, and property managers to supply 14 lines of info for each unit, with yearly updates.
The City Council was ideal to quash the Residential Rental Database Ordinance.
Fiebelkorn's other proposition would have simply restricted charges and added transparency to leases and rental contracts. Landlords would have been needed to reveal upfront to potential applicants a few of their screening requirements, and just how much they charge in animal, parking, bug control and other costs.
Fiebelkorn's Residential Tenant Protection Ordinance also would have limited application charges to $150 and needed property managers to provide refunds in cases where they accepted an application cost from a potential client, however never in fact processed the application for different reasons, such as when someone else leased the system.
That proposal could have utilized some tweaking based on property owner complaints, however there was plenty to restore that would have supplied required transparency for tenants. The City Council rejected it by a 4-5 vote at its March 6 conference.
Meanwhile, working families and retired people are being squeezed out of the
Albuquerque rental market post-pandemic.
Aaron Barreras informed the Journal the lease had been stable at his Northeast
Albuquerque apartment for 10 years, increasing by just $100. Granted, it sounds like he had a very sweet offer, paying just $789 a month for his two-bedroom townhouse. However a 28% increase to $1,010, which happened after an out-of-state real estate investment firm bought Spain Townhomes last summertime, was a tough hit and he is looking for a new location.
A variety of elements are triggering rental expenses to skyrocket at a lot of
Albuquerque's 8,000 multifamily rental properties: an end to a moratorium on expulsions enforced during the pandemic; below-market rental rates pre-pandemic; a shortage of rentals; increased expenses for labor and products; a growing variety of real estate investors getting in the rental market, with numerous raising rents as they guarantee to update homes; and the so-called FAANG effect, the moving of workers of significant tech companies to the
Albuquerque area.
The cumulative impact has sprouted a lease control motion, which state lawmakers wisely nixed in the past legal session due to the fact that of its potentially chilling effect on real estate development. But as it stands, there's little legal recourse in New Mexico for occupants because of the absence of occupant protection laws.
While there is no doubt
Albuquerque is in a real estate crisis, rent control is not the way to go. More stock, competition, tenant-protection laws and openness are the answers.
The City Council need to make it a concern to discover that middle ground of better protecting tenants while motivating investments in multifamily real estate.
This editorial initially appeared in the
Albuquerque Journal. It was composed by members of the editorial board and is anonymous as it represents the opinion of the paper instead of the authors.
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