There is a version of the rent control debate that never gets had. It is not the argument about supply curves and housing starts, which economists conduct among themselves and which persuades no one who did not already agree. It is a more basic question, and Salinas voters will face it directly on November 3, 2026, when a repeal measure appears on the ballot: when a community decides that housing must be made affordable, who owes the money?
The answer Salinas has given is that the owners of pre-1995 multifamily buildings owe it.
What government is for
Start where the framers of our political tradition started. John Locke argued that people leave the state of nature and submit to government for one primary reason: to secure their property, their lives, liberties, and estates, the things a person acquires through labor and holds by right. Government exists because private judgment cannot reliably protect these things. It is a tool we build for that purpose.
This has a consequence that is easy to state and easy to forget. A government that takes from some citizens to benefit others has not merely made a policy error. It has inverted its own justification. The institution created to protect estates has become the thing the estates need protecting from.
Locke did not think property was absolute. He accepted taxation, provided it was levied by consent through a legislature. But note what that concession requires: taxation is general. It falls on citizens as citizens, according to some public measure of capacity. The consent that legitimizes it is the consent of a body that shares the burden it imposes.
What The Salinas Rent Stabilization Ordinance actually does
Adopted in September 2024 and operative January 1, 2025, the Rent Stabilization Ordinance limits annual increases to the lesser of 2.75% or 75% of the most recent twelve-month increase in the CPI-U. Note the second half of that formula. It does not merely cap increases at inflation, it caps them at three-quarters of inflation. The policy is not designed to hold rents steady in real terms. It is designed to reduce them in real terms, every year, indefinitely.
It applies to multifamily dwellings; duplexes, triplexes, apartment buildings built before February 1, 1995. Single-family homes, condominiums, and anything built after that date are exempt, a boundary set by the state’s Costa-Hawkins Act rather than by any judgment about need.
And the city charges for the privilege. Rental registration costs $29 per unit per year for units not subject to rent stabilization, and $112 per unit per year for those that are. Read that again. The owners whose income the city has capped are also the owners billed nearly four times as much to administer the capping. The regulated population funds its own regulation.
Who is exempt
Consider who bears none of this:
The homeowner. A family in a paid-off house on the east side contributes nothing. Their net worth may well exceed that of the landlord down the street. They vote on the policy and pay none of it.
The renter who can afford market rate. Salinas has residents renting comfortably within their means. They receive a below-market cap. Nothing in the ordinance asks whether they need it.
The owner of a 1996 building. Identical structure, identical tenants, identical rents — exempt, because of a date in a state statute passed thirty years ago.
Commercial property. Same asset class, no comparable obligation.
Every business in the city. Firms benefit from a stable local workforce — the standard justification for affordability policy and pay nothing toward producing it.
The burden falls where it falls for one reason: these owners are identifiable, relatively few, and taking from them requires no one to vote for a tax. That is not a principle. It is the path of least political resistance, found in a group too small to block it.
Arbitrary in both directions
The unfairness is not only in who pays.
Costa-Hawkins permits landlords to reset rents to market when a unit becomes vacant. So the benefit accrues to whoever holds a lease not to the family living in a car on Sanborn Road, not to the household on the county waitlist, not to the young couple who will look next year. The beneficiary is the incumbent tenant, selected by the accident of timing rather than by need.
Meanwhile the burden falls without regard to circumstance. The owner who inherited a fourplex in 1985 and the one who bought a 1970s building last year at current interest rates face the same cap and the same $112 per unit. Capacity to absorb the loss appears nowhere in the calculation.
A policy arbitrary in who pays and arbitrary in who benefits has a weak claim on the word “fair,” whatever else may be said for it.
The honest counterargument
Two responses deserve a hearing.
The first: landlords are not arbitrary at all. Property in land is unusual, much of its value comes from what the surrounding community builds. When Salinas invests in roads, schools, and safety, rents rise, and the owner captures a gain he did not create. This is a real point, and it grounds a real argument for a local sales tax or income tax dedicated to housing, tools that spread the cost of that public investment across everyone who benefits from it rather than isolating it to whoever happens to own rental property. It does not obviously ground a cap set at 75% of CPI, which hits the owner of a modest building on a stagnant block exactly as hard as one riding a wave.
The second is more forceful: the broad-based alternative is not, in practice, on offer. A dedicated sales tax or local income tax for housing requires voter approval, and Salinas voters have not passed one. More than half of Salinas households rent, and the city’s own record documents displacement driven by rent increases. If voters will not approve a tax, the choice is not between this ordinance and a fair scheme. It is between this ordinance and nothing, and families facing displacement do not benefit from our fastidiousness about who pays.
That deserves respect, but it proves less than it claims. A community’s refusal to fund something collectively is evidence about what that community actually wants. A majority that votes for affordability but will not pay for it has not encountered a political obstacle, it has revealed a preference for the appearance of a solution at someone else’s expense. Building policy on that foundation does not make it just. It makes it convenient.
What Salinas should do instead
The obligation is real. A city where farmworkers, teachers, and nurses cannot afford to live is a city with a problem, and the problem is civic as much as economic. Michael Sandel, a political philosopher of Harvard, is right that a community sorted entirely by price loses something a community needs.
But the response should look like a shared obligation, because that is what it is:
Fund assistance through general revenue, so the cost is visible and borne in proportion to means.
Remove the barriers to building. Much of the scarcity driving Salinas rents is manufactured — zoning, parking minimums, permitting delays. These are city choices, unmakeable at no cost to anyone’s property.
Target aid to need, rather than to whoever held a lease on January 1, 2025.
Stop charging the regulated for their own regulation. If rent stabilization serves the public, the public should fund its administration.