There are millions of them. They may be the most underepresented and potentially powerful political and economic force in California.
They’ve been financially bloodied by a squeaky-tight housing market, pushed around by powerful landed interests and stripped of their tax credits by politicians.
They are renters, occupying 44 percent of the housing units in California and numbering more than 12 million people.
And Mark Sherwood, who rents an apartment near San Jose in Campbell, wants to recruit all of them into his non-profit California Tenants Association.
From a modest beginning less than a year ago with his 60-member tenants union in his former apartment complex in Cupertino, Sherwood now boasts slightly more than 1,000 dues-paying members from San Diego to Eureka.
Most of them are in the San Francisco Bay area, in San Jose, Sunnyvale, Hayward, Palo Alto, Cupertino, Fremont and Campbell.
“That’s not a small start,” observed Suzana Gal, spokeswoman for Project Sentinel, another non-profit group that provides rent mediation services in a number of cities in Santa Clara County. “If there are 1,000 renters who pay membership dues, that’s very impressive.”
Tops on Sherwood’s agenda if negotiation fails to sway landlords: rent control.
Only 16 cities in the state have some form of rent control, including San Jose, Campbell, Los Gatos, Berkeley, East Palo Alto, Hayward, Oakland and San Francisco.
Many residences of even those cities are exempted. San Jose’s ordinance, for example, only covers complexes with four or more units built before 1979.
“We want rents tied to a common market rate like the consumer price index,” Sherwood said.
Although the recent surge in rent increases has eased, rents still remain a high-profile concern for many.
For example, 47 percent of residents of Alameda County rent. In Mountain View, it’s 62 percent, in Campbell 53 percent and in Sunnyvale, 51 percent.
Even in pricey Palo Alto, 43 percent of households are renters. Statewide, the proportion of renters is 44 percent.
As vacancy rates dropped last year, rents soared. Increases of $200 a month have not been uncommon.
Santa Clara County still is the third tightest housing market in the country, with an occupancy rate of 97.8 percent, according to Sean Hockens of M/PF Research Inc., in Dallas, which tracks large complexes in 56 major markets (excluding New York City, Boston, Milwaukee and New Orleans). Only San Francisco and Seattle, at 98 percent, rank higher.
The average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Santa Clara County is $1,195, he said, for a two-bedroom, $1,351, and a three-bedroom, $1,748.
The good news?
“A couple of trends are going to help tenants,” Hockens said. “Job growth in the metro areas has slowed down, and we’ve had a big increase in the number of apartments given permits. We should start to see a new supply come on line.”
In 1996, he said, permits were issued for 3,159 apartment units in Santa Clara County, the highest number in eight years.
“That should slow down the rate of rent increases.”
Sherwood, however, doesn’t trust market forces.
An earnest man and single father of two with a penchant for backing the underdog, Sherwood won the allegiance this year of a group of angry tenants in Fremont. Recently, his association joined with a coalition of tenant groups in Campbell to strengthen rent control there.
Now he wants to take on landlords all over the state, meeting with Assemblymen in Sacramento.
Sherwood was emboldened to launch his renters’ rights organization after he helped negotiate down, by half, a 30 percent rent increase proposed by the landlord of the Cupertino complex where he formerly lived. He extracted other commitments, as well, for better building maintenance, repainting of apartments and replacement of worn carpets.
And he wants landlords to know his association will turn them in to the Internal Revenue Service if it thinks they’re under-reporting income or over-reporting on repairs. The group has reported three landlords so far, in San Jose, Cupertino and Fremont, he said.
“Forty percent of the people in the Santa Clara Valley rent,” he said. “That’s a substantial number not to be represented. We need strong lobbying in Sacramento and at the city and county levels. Landlords have too much power.”
Considering that the tenants association got its start in Silicon Valley, the group’s first step was a logical one: It opened a Web site on the Internet.
Sherwood induced Mike Harris, who operates Media & Technology, a public relations firm in San Jose, to design CTA’s Web page and do marketing and promotional work.
“I’m a renter, and I work out of my home,” said Harris. “I live in a one-bedroom apartment that rents for $1,290 a month and I’ve been trying to get a second phone line for the Internet. But the landlord has bad cable and would have to replace it, and he’s been dragging his heels.”
Not everyone believes the time is ripe for a statewide tenants union.
“Keep in mind, not all of California is as hot a housing market as Silicon Valley,” said Beth Makosey, spokeswoman for the Tri-County Apartment Association and herself a renter.
The association, representing 3,000 landlords and 15,000 units in Santa Clara, San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties, works with tenant advocacy groups “to avoid conflict and misunderstandings,” she said.
“If their goal is to educate and mediate,” she said of Sherwood’s tenants union, “we’ll work with them. Most landlords are professional and are open to compromise. Tenants have more power than is recognized.”
But Sherwood is still something of an unknown quantity, Makosey said.
“The San Jose Real Estate Board’s government relations committee invited him to come to discuss issues. He didn’t show. So nobody’s had an opportunity to talk to him.”
And Sherwood has had tenant problems of his own. He acknowledges that he was evicted by his Cupertino landlord after he was late with a rent payment, explaining that he was out of the area attending to his dying mother.
Sherwood and Harris, meanwhile, continue to develop their Website, which contains a good deal of educational material on tenant rights. Dues are $65 a year per family or dwelling unit, and Sherwood pledges half of that will go to member services.
“What we’re trying to do is use this (Campbell) ordinance as a model and bring it next to Palo Alto and Fremont, two areas that are in absolute crisis,” he said. “They are experiencing rent increases they cannot afford.”
