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City schedules Feb. 24 study session to evaluate a rental registry; staff warns of capacity trade-offs
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Summary
Staff will present the rental-registry options at a Feb. 24 study session, reviewing examples from 40+ California cities; staff cautioned the work would require budget and staff capacity and could displace other housing work unless funded.
City staff said it will present a study session to the City Council on Feb. 24 to evaluate a rental-registry program, explaining options, software choices, applicability to property types and lessons learned from more than 40 California cities that have implemented such registries.
David (housing staff) told the developers that a registry is primarily a data‑collection tool; it can provide reliable inventories of rental units and associated metadata, but implementing and maintaining an ordinance‑based registry requires staff time and budget. "As a city, we have limited datasets on our rental housing stock," David said. "One of the key takeaways is that... we have very few actual data sets that we have access to."
Staff emphasized the study session is informational: a study session will not itself create a registry. If council directs staff to pursue a full implementation, staff would need to reallocate or add staff resources in the next budget cycle. Several participants suggested that finance might be asked to expand the business‑license data collection as an interim step, while others warned the business‑license process produces raw data that still requires housing‑department analysis.
Discussion also covered practical questions: whether all rental units must hold a business license (staff noted limitations to that approach), trade‑offs between immediate revenue via business‑license enforcement versus the higher‑quality data a purpose‑built registry provides, and the need to define the registry's policy goals (for example, revenue generation, housing stock inventory, or inspection/health priorities).
Staff asked stakeholders to attend the Feb. 24 study session and to provide feedback on goals, resources and desired outcomes. The study session will inform whether staff brings an implementation proposal to the council and, if so, how it will be funded and staffed.
