Why this matters
San Diegans, similar to residents in other communities, are grappling with a worsening housing and homelessness crisis. The ability to measure this problem is key to stretch limited resources to those who need it most.
An effort to learn more about why San Diegans are getting kicked out of their homes is losing support.
A majority of San Diego’s nine-member City Council previously supported setting money aside to start collecting data on all eviction notices sent to city renters. Such a database could help guide policy and direct limited funding where it’s needed most.
But now, in the face of a $258 million budget shortfall in the coming year, that majority support for an eviction registry dwindled from five to three, as council members grappled Wednesday with potential cuts to city services across the board.
Council President Joe LaCava pulled the registry from his list of budget priorities because he said he believed the focus should be delivering on responsibilities to public health and safety, “knowing that we were not going to have funding for new programs.”
“Since that (registry) has yet to get off the ground, I wanted to focus on protecting the programs that are actually part of our core services,” LaCava added, speaking to reporters at a press conference Thursday. “It is about being very, very modest and really lowering expectations in terms of what we think we can fund in next year’s budget.”
Councilmember Jennifer Campbell, who also pulled the registry from her list of priorities, declined to comment.
Councilmembers Henry Foster, Kent Lee and Sean Elo-Rivera all included the registry in their list of budget priorities for the coming year.
Foster said he believes the registry could be an important and effective tool.
“The more information we have, I think the better we are in a position to make the right decisions,” he said. “So that we can stay ahead of the issues instead of constantly being in a reactionary mode.”
Elo-Rivera, who originally pushed for the registry two years ago as council president, said it’s not clear where things stand.
“However, it continues to be a priority for our office and we will continue to advocate for it,” he said in a statement.
These updated budget priorities come on the heels of voters rejecting Measure E, a one-cent sales tax that would have generated up to $400 million annually, which officials had hoped would help fund city business for years to come. Local governments are required by law to balance their budgets, or spend no more than what they collect, and San Diego officials have been scrambling to bridge the gap.
Officials anticipated that the eviction data tracker, known officially as the Tenant Termination Notice Registry, would cost at most $500,000 to make it reality — that represents a tiny fraction of the city’s $5.8 billion overall budget.
The effort started nearly two years ago, when top San Diego officials set out to bring tenant protections up to and beyond those set by state law.
In addition, they wanted to require property owners and managers to alert the city within three days of giving tenants an eviction notice. That kind of data would offer a window into the reasons why people are being evicted in the middle of a housing and affordability crisis. The only information available right now is the number of court filings, and records show about 750 evictions are filed every month in San Diego Superior Court.
Thousands of eviction filings later and a registry still doesn’t exist. inewsource reported on the delay in December and attempted to unravel where the effort stalled. It ultimately came down to a city law that requires public oversight on all new surveillance and data collection efforts, and a back-and-forth among city officials about whether that law applies in this case.
One of the architects behind the city law, known as Transparent and Responsible use of Surveillance Technology, or TRUST, has said public oversight is essential to ensuring privacy is protected, regardless of the kind of data that’s collected.
The proposal is not without critics. The Southern California Rental Housing Association, a group that represents thousands in the rental housing industry, notified the Council that it had concerns with the data collection effort.
Type of Content
News: Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
