The Rent War Is Over; End the Controls : Housing: It’s ridiculous for Los Angeles to keep a $7-million bureaucracy just in case of a future crisis.

The Los Angeles Housing Department is continuing its stalling tactics to prevent the City Council from examining a 1993 rental housing study that demonstrated there is no longer any economic benefit to tenants from the city’s rent stabilization ordinance. But Hamilton, Alschuler & Rabinovitz, the consultants who conducted the study for the city, recommended that the rent law be kept alive--just in case it may be needed in some future crisis.

This is the same argument that “hawks” used after the Vietnam War in an attempt to keep the draft alive. Congress disagreed, with members deciding that they could craft a new Selective Service system if one ever was needed.

The City Council should do likewise on rent controls. Inflation has stabilized. Real estate speculation has vanished. Apartment vacancies exceed 8%. None of the reasons that led the council to enact a rent increase moratorium in 1978 and the ordinance in 1979 exist today.

Why should apartment rents be the only commodity or service regulated by municipal price controls? The city doesn’t control the price of carpets, drapes, electricians, plumbers, painters, gardeners, food, automobiles, newspapers, clothing, gasoline, appliances, skilled or unskilled labor (except for city contractors), medicine, doctors, dentists or lawyers. It only controls the price of apartments built before October 1978.

Does it make sense to keep a $7-million-a-year bureaucracy in place just in case there is a new housing crisis some day? Outgoing Housing Director Gary Squier used the annual $14 per unit rent control fee as a cash cow to support his crusade against slumlords. He devised half a dozen city programs that threaten rent reductions against slumlords. But the city surely can find other effective methods to stop abuses without inflicting perpetual price controls on landlords who do maintain their properties.

The city’s housing study also indicates a drastic drop in tenant income, the result of recession, the end of the Cold War and the loss of high-paying professional aerospace jobs. Job loss is a serious social problem that needs attention. But the tenant income problem won’t be resolved by keeping an outdated rent control system in place, nor is it a legal justification for continuing the ordinance.

Rent control should go. The City Council should declare victory in its 20-year war against excessive rents and let the rent stabilization ordinance expire. But if the council members lack the political courage to terminate rent control, they should at least phase it out as units are vacated (which would protect in-place tenants) or set a term limit mandating a specific date in the future when the rent stabilization ordinance will pass into history.