Sen. Monique Limón
Did You Know? Bonnie Donovan
Once more, a politician punishes the innocent, for the sins of the government.
The sour taste of a Limón is expressed in Sen. Monique Limón’s Senate Bill 584, where she is proposing an additional tax, code-named an “assessment,” on short-term rentals.
It appears that it would include families who rent out a B & B room and bathroom to vacationers, including other small landlords in California, focusing on coastal cities.
This bill does not quantify the amount of this assessment, but it appears to be a percentage of the rent for short-term stays and must be payable within 90 days of the receipt of the rent.
The reason given for this bill is: “To fund workforce housing for those who cannot afford market-price rents.”
This is a bill that will make potential tax criminals out of non-wealthy people, who both provide a rental service and supplement their incomes because, for many of them, without it, they could not afford to live here.
The Limón-proposed “assessment” will add another tax on top of property taxes, federal income taxes, state income taxes and an existing 12% bed tax, plus other charges and restrictions imposed by the local governments on short-term rentals.
In the meantime, the real culprits creating housing shortages in Santa Barbara include UCSB and Santa Barbara City College — in UCSB’s case, that’s to the tune of 14,050 students and staff. UCSB was committed to provide housing for 5,000 students, plus 2,000 for faculty and staff, prior to reaching a level of 25,000 students.
In addition, there are more than 7,000 students attending SBCC who are from out of town, or who do not live with their parents, for whom no housing is provided by SBCC.
In 2010, UCSB proposed a long-range plan for approval by the local government. In this plan, UCSB committed to cap its student body at 25,000 students by 2025 and to build an additional 5,000 housing units for students and an additional 2,000 housing units for faculty and staff commensurate with the growth.
Based on these commitments to the community, the plan was approved by local government officials. However, there were no six-monthly reviews of progress against these commitments by the approving authorities. Why? Was this incompetence? Or was this a kind of “nod, nod, wink, wink deal?
It wasn’t until 2021 that the penny dropped. Local government officials became alarmed. The student body was already above 25,000 in UCSB, but only 1,500 additional student housing units have been built. And only 260 housing units for faculty and staff.
It is now estimated that more than 14,000 attendees and staff of UCSB live in Isla Vista. An unknown number of UCSB students and staff live outside Isla Vista in Goleta and Santa Barbara.
Santa Barbara City College was chartered as a local community college. It is no longer that. SBCC has 12,525 students. Approximately 55% of them are from outside the SBCC charter service area. They come from other cities, other states and other countries. SBCC is a feeder to UCSB for students who could not pass the entry requirements as freshman to UCSB. In fact, UCSB has just made it much easier for a student at SBCC to gain entry to the four-year university.
As SBCC is chartered as a community college, it was based on the assumption that local students in a local community college would reside at their parent’s homes during the two-year course of study.
There are almost 7,000 out-of-charter students living in the community, because SBCC provides no student housing. This number assumes that the other 5,636 local-area students live at home with their parents. But this is unlikely. It is safe to guess that there are at least another 1,000 students renting accommodation in the Santa Barbara or Goleta areas.
Sacramento is forcing on us a crash program to build millions of new houses in our cities. But, just in Santa Barbara alone, there are thousands of UCSB and SBCC students from other states and countries occupying low cost-housing. In addition, millions of undocumented immigrants (see below) are occupying housing in all California cities that, otherwise, could be available to American citizens.
Getting back to Sen. Limón and her bill. She should be aiming her big guns at universities and colleges across the state that charge outlandish college fees, but don’t provide any housing or adequate housing, for their students nor their staff and faculty. But then, these institutions are quasi-government entities, and you don’t turn on your own. The repercussions would be more severe, than aiming at a small section of the public, who is just trying to get by in a cost-of-living crisis, caused by policies of the Democratic Party.
What Sen. Limón is not planning for are equal and opposite countermeasures against her financial assessment on short-term rentals. The people she is aiming at will switch to longer-term student rentals. Or they will sell their property into the unaffordable housing market. It’s this kind of punitive legislation that has killed the long-term, private rental market in Santa Barbara and other cities where landlords are regarded by the political class as evil, predatory profiteers who do not deserve legal protections against government overreach.
But this is by no means the end of government responsibility for our housing crisis.
Adding to the failure of local, tax-funded, colleges failing to provide adequate, or any housing, for their students, faculty and staff, Gov. Gavin Newsom has made California a sanctuary state for illegal immigrants.
The latest statistics show that the number of undocumented immigrants in California has reached 2,730,000, and growing, creating a housing crisis that crowds out American citizens at the lower end of the income scale — “those who no longer can afford market price rents.” There are more than a million residential units taken out of California’s housing stock by people who are here illegally, according to federal law.
Sen. Limón’s failings go beyond pernicious taxation. She is also into punishing legal, taxpaying, brick and mortar businesses/entrepreneurs!
She voted for Senate Bill 972 which legalized street vendors who are, by definition, cash-only, tax-evading, non-accountable, uninspected purveyors of food, drinks and other goods.
These vendors are a third-world eyesore in our city, adding to the shantytown of structures ruining our once-beautiful State Street.
Bonnie Donovan writes the “Did You Know?” column in conjunction with a bipartisan group of local citizens. It appears Saturdays in the Voices section.
