California doesn’t really want to make landlords accept pets

SACRAMENTO, California — A San Francisco lawmaker’s proposal to allow more renters to have pets exploded in the media and infuriated California landlords who saw it as another blow from a mandate-happy state government.

That was all part of his strategy, but he wasn’t prepared for the non-stop calls from reporters that started pouring in after he announced a new bill to stop “landlords from denying housing to tenants with pets.”

“We never intended to say that landlords can place no restrictions at all,” Assemblymember Matt Haney told POLITICO. “Nobody is going to be forced to take dangerous dogs … of course there’s going to be cases where restrictions make sense.”

Haney, a Democrat, said his bill — whose details are finally in print — is far more narrow than the first news cycle made it seem and that it wouldn't make landlords accept all pets. Instead, it would require them to have a good reason for refusing pets and limit how much they could charge tenants who have them. He stressed it doesn’t warrant the “fire and brimstone” response it got from influential apartment and landlord interests, who called it “death by a thousand cuts.”

The dustup was in part a creation of Haney’s own making. And it lifts the curtain on how Sacramento lawmakers try to gain leverage by strategically dangling far-reaching mandates only to walk them back during negotiations.

The episode is a case study in how legislation goes viral and a lesson in how not all publicity is necessarily good for everyone involved.

“There’s downsides every single time the Legislature does something, then they blame us because rents are going up,” said Debra Carlton, executive vice president of state government affairs for the California Apartment Association. “It’s hard to get stuff built, and then they just regulate us.”

In late February, Haney’s office announced the idea for the bill, but outside of his release there were no details available. It set off a flurry of news headlines that landlords would now be forced to accept pet-owning tenants. The bill was catnip: an easy-to-understand concept that impacts hundreds of thousands of Californians navigating a tight rental market. It also pits some of the most sympathetic actors — pets — against landlords, who are often vilified in the progressive, high-cost state.

Ultimately, the outcry over forcing landlords to start accepting pets may have been premature, as were calls for a less extreme approach, which was already in the works. Carlton initially just wanted a bill that would allow landlords to collect a one-time deposit of two or 2 ½ months of rent to people with pets, which would have been relatively uncontroversial, she said.

To be sure, Carlton still isn’t thrilled with all of the provisions of the scaled-back version, either. Not charging monthly for pets means landlords will just raise everyone’s rent to cover potential damages, especially if they can’t hike security deposits without running up against the cap on deposits that a different Haney bill last year instituted.

“Legislators are famous for doing the hard, hard, furthest thing from what they meant to do so that they force us to negotiate and they give us something we might not have wanted anyway,” said Carlton.

Sponsors of the bill say sometimes you need this approach to get the ball rolling on an important issue. And Haney himself believes despite all the early chatter there’s plenty of room to get something done.

“I think it really starts a conversation in California about how important pets are to people,” said Jenny Berg, the California state director for the Humane Society, the sponsor of Haney’s bill. “A huge population of renters have pets, and they don’t want to leave their pet behind because they can’t put a roof over their heads.”

But the success of a strategy like that depends on who you’re up against, and the California Apartment Association knows how to throw its weight around. Haney says he has a good relationship with the powerful interest group.

If this were a bill on rent control or reforming the Ellis Act (which lets local governments restrict when landlords can evict tenants on their way out of the rental market) it would have been dead on arrival because those are non-negotiable for landlords, he said. But for something as popular as housing dogs and cats, he isn’t expecting huge pushback to a scaled-down measure.

“People love puppies. There are few things more lovable in America than that,” Haney said.

The real details of the bill are far less extreme than they’ve been portrayed.

Landlords will still be able to prohibit pets — cats, dogs and other animals kept for companionship, not commerce — as long as they provide transparent reasons why. He wants to outlaw monthly “pet rent,” though said landlords can have reasonable policies or limitations on pets. Tenants would still need to disclose that they have a pet, but not on the first application.

Allowing pets into apartments shouldn’t be controversial, Haney said. But if he’d started from a more moderate place, he would have had no room to work with the opposition on things like allowing some pet bans or requiring renters to have some kind of liability insurance.

Haney, who leads the renters’ caucus in the Assembly, has experienced firsthand the problem of finding a place to live while caring for his two cats, Eddy and Ellis.

He noted the lack of affordable housing is even worse for people with pets, who are immediately barred from 30 percent of open units. There’s a shortage of available space in animal shelters as well, and letting pet owners rent apartments would keep them from surrendering their pets to already-crowded shelters.