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Nicole Montojo, a housing researcher at the Haas Institute, and Stephen Barton, former Housing Director for Berkeley, present their new report on the housing crisis, titled "Opening the Door for Rent Control: Toward a Comprehensive Approach to Protecting California's Renters," in this Wednesday, Sept. 19 event at the Greenlining Institute in Oakland.

Other Speakers:
Gerald Lenoir, moderator and Strategy Analyst at the Haas Institute
Helen Duffy, retired educator, and current West Oakland Landlord
Merika Reagan, East Oakland tenant

The report, executive summary, and a press release are available here. The slides used during the event can be downloaded here. A transcript of this talk is available below.

 

Video Transcript:

Audience: Good morning.

Gerald Lenoir: My name is Gerald Lenoir. I'm a strategy analyst at the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at UC Berkeley and I will be the moderator for the day's briefing. So welcome to the press, to representatives of our community organizations and individuals from the community to this briefing.

The Haas Institute brings together researchers, community stakeholders, and policymakers to identify and challenge barriers to inclusive, just, and sustainable society in order to create transformative change. This morning, we are releasing a new report titled, "Opening the Door for Rent Control: Towards a Comprehensive Approach to Protecting California's Renters." It is a well researched-

Mic guy: Let's get the mic down a little bit.

Gerald Lenoir: Okay.

Audience: [inaudible 00:00:57]

Mic guy: Yeah. You might want to hold it down a little.

Gerald Lenoir: Okay how's this? Is that better? I don't want to bust anybody's eardrums.

As I was saying, it is a well researched, well documented report on the stabilizing impact on rent control policies, a set of comprehensive policies that promote housing as a right. We will hear from two of the authors of the report, as well a landlord and a tenant that support the findings of the report. We will hear from Nicole Montojo and Stephen Barton, who are two of the three primary authors of the reports along with Eli Moore. And we also want recognize EJ Toppin who is in the audience who contributed to the report and Evan Bissell, who also is in the audience. So first we'll hear from Nicole and Stephen.

Gerald Lenoir: Nicole Montojo is a housing research analyst for the California Community Partnerships program at the Haas Institute. Her research focus is on the affordable housing policy, displacement, and gentrification and equitable planning and governance. She holds a master degree in City Planning from UC Berkeley.

After we hear from Nicole, we will hear from Stephen Barton. He has a Phd in City and Regional Planning from UC Berkeley and is the co-author of Common Interest Communities: Private Government and the Public Interest. He is the author numerous articles on housing policies and economics. And is an adviser to the City of Berkeley, East Palo Alto, Richmond and San Mateo on housing issues. Now retired, he previously served as a housing director for the City of Berkeley, as the deputy director of the Berkeley Rent Stabilization program.

Gerald Lenoir: So please invite Nicole Montojo to the podium.

Nicole Montojo: Thank you Gerald. Hello everyone, my name is Nicole Montojo. I am here from the Haas Institute. I thank you for joining us today. So to give you a quick overall of what we're going to talk about, I'll give some context about the report and then discuss the consequences of the housing affordability crisis. Before I hand it over to Steve, who will discuss the rationale for rent control and then we'll conclude by discussing what we mean by rent control as part as a comprehensive policy approach.

So I know we are all well aware of the housing crisis in California. And we too at the Haas institute are concerned about the impacts that it has on the physical and mental health and well being of so many of our state's residents and particularly renters. And we come at this from a perspective of housing being more than simply having shelter. And we talk about housing as a locus of opportunity and it's really about access to good schools and good jobs. To healthy and safe neighborhoods, to community and support networks. And also to wealth and upward mobility. And so this brief came about as we have observed in our research that a lot of the public debates are-

Mic lady: I'll put this right here.

Nicole Montojo: Too narrow. In particularly how they consider the needs of renters and what we're calling for is an expansion of that conversation and right now what we've seen is that there is often a flaw dichotomy that characterizes the debates on rent control and often picks rent control against producing or building more housing. And what we saw in the report, it doesn't have to be an either or. And it isn't an either or and that this frame work really fails to prioritized the needs of renters and the consideration of what the impacts of the crisis have for the long term. Both on individuals and also society in California as a whole. And this really undermines our overall goal of providing affordable housing for all and really also limits government's ability to be able to respond to the immediate needs of our residents.

Okay. So let me talk a little bit about ... oh. My slide is missing. So what our analysis shows is that the data points to a clear need to stabilize existing renters and that this must be a key policy objective in any approach that we take to the housing crisis. And particularity given that 54 percent of renters in California are burdened by housing costs and this number has grown a lot in the last decade. And this is equivalent to about an estimated 9.5 million tenants. And given this, the question that we put forward and that we see as a framework for this discussion, is how do we protect overburden renters from displacement and increase the need and supply of housing to meet the needs of people of income levels. And so I'll talk a little bit about the data that got us to this focus.

First if you have the report in front of you, we look at the rent ... how rent has risen and compared to renter's income over time and this is a chart on page 11. And what we saw is that from 2000 to 2016, the median rent has increased by over $3,400 in the annual rent and at the same time the annual median rent has actually decreased. So it's no surprise that we're in the situation that we're in. And related, we've found that 73 percent of all jobs in California don't pay enough to afford the rent on a 2 bedroom apartment at fair market rent which is approximately $1700. So that's 23 million jobs in California. And to put that in context for a minimum wage worker, they would have to work a 119 hours a week to be able to afford this level of rent which is equivalent to about three full time jobs which makes affordable housing.

Mic guy: You want to just try ...

Nicole Montojo: Okay. That makes affordable housing simply out of reach for many minimum wage workers. So what this means is that renters as a whole are being set back. And the divide between renters and homeowners has grown over time. And this chart on page 14 shows that the gap in between the rates of cost burden for homeowners and renters in 2015 was about 22 percentage points which is grown as you can see over time. And when we decipher the data on cost burden by race, it's clear that there are implications for racial equality. The higher rates of rent burden for Black and Latino households ... and their lower homeowner's rates as well create a greater risk of these households being pushed away from opportunity and being displaced. And what we discussed in the report is how this is pushing people away, reinforcing structural barriers to inclusion and also recreating segregation. And these disparate impacts are often layered on top of other issues. On top of race, seniors and people with disabilities and low income families with children also experience disparate burdens.

For example, low income families ... a study by the Federal Reserve found that they spend a median of three-fifths of their income monthly on rent which leaves only 450 dollars left over for all other living expenses. So what are the consequences of all of this? Key among is the increase in homelessness in California on any given night. There are over 134,000 individuals experiencing homelessness and this is an increase in just one year of 16 thousand people making California the state with the highest number of people experiencing homelessness in the country.

And we also spend a lot of time in the report discussing the tremendous amount of research that has been done on the consequences to physical and mental health of individuals who are facing housing instability and housing insecurity and also homelessness. And what that research has shown is that people experiencing housing insecurity are three times more likely to be under frequent mental distress and facing difficult trade-offs between choosing to pay for rent or other basic needs often finding themselves with the only choice of living in unhealthy conditions. Whether that's housing that exposes them to toxins or pests and also this means disconnection from community and all this has incredibly intense impacts on children. And the report talks about how all these impacts can last a lifetime and given the widespread impact on so many tenants this really adds up and leads to a broader societal impact that affects our economy. It affects our environment and creates traffic. It also affects our ability to thrive simply as all Californians. And strains our budgets and also our healthcare systems. So these are the cost that have to be taken into account when we're considering what policy solutions we want to consider. So I'll hand it over to Steve now.

Stephen Barton: Thank you Nicole. It's been a real pleasure to renew my connection to UC Berkeley and work with the folks at the Haas Institute. The chart that's before you right now shows longtime trend in real inflation adjustment rents and the top line is the San Francisco Bay Area. The middle line is the Los Angeles Metropolitan area. The bottom line is the United States as a whole. And as you can see, for the past 40 years, there's been a series of major run ups in rent that have led to the current crisis. Now the kind of policies discourse that we hear is largely shaped by basically a fundamental misunderstanding ... a set of fundamental misunderstandings of how the rental housing market works.

So let's start by saying that there is no "the market". It's not that there's government and there's the market and government interferes with the market. A market is a socially created institution. And since it is socially created since it doesn't work without the framework that government provides of defining rights and obligations ... Setting and enforcing rules, providing all the essential infrastructure and structure that enable commerce to move in a society.

Since it's a socially created institution, it should serve the public interest and indeed that's what its' purpose is supposed to be. And that means that as conditions change, government needs to adjust the rules to keep the markets working in the public interest but it's clear that the renter housing market in California today is not serving that interest. So the question is, how do we do that?

How do the people of California change the rules so that the renter housing market in California can serve the public interest? Well we often hear is, "Oh, it's a simple matter of supply and demand." You know there's a simple model of how things work with ordinary commodities. If the demand for heirloom tomatoes increases beyond the current supply of heirloom tomatoes, the prices goes up. Farmers increase their production, they could quickly double production in a year or two and then the prices of heirloom tomatoes fall back down and there's a lot more heirloom prices available on the market. It won't be a surprise in any of you that housing is not like heirloom tomatoes.

When the current rate of housing production in California increases the supply by one percent per year. Actually slightly less than one percent per year. So if we manage to overcome all of the obstacles, the shortage of construction worker, exclusionary land use regulations, geographically constraints, all the different barriers and manage to double housing production, we would add two percent per year.

So you increase the supply by small increments over a long period of time. There's a report by the McKenzie Company that estimated that California needs another three and a half million units, seven years from now. That would take 30 years at the current rate. And there's another thing that's very important to understand about housing which is that rental housing is actually segmented into two different kinds of markets. There's the market for new housing and there's the market for old housing.

New housing gets built for higher income tenants who can pay rents high enough to profitably repay the construction costs as well as the ongoing operating and maintenance cost. So that reaches the high end of the renter market to tenants who have relatively high incomes. Most tenants can't afford to live in new construction. They live in older buildings, where the cost of construction was paid off years ago.

Now if you have an adequate supply of older housing, then competition among the landlord would keep rents down to the minimum necessary to cover the operating and maintenance expenses and make a modest profit. I have a friend who is a developer and landlord in Tampa, Florida. He was telling me recently about how he is renting nicely maintained two bedroom units for $700 a month. And that he makes what he feels is a perfectly adequate profit because he recouped his construction costs long ago.

So that's what happens if you have a sufficient supply of older housing. But when you have a shortage of housing, rents go up in both new and older housing. Now pricing increases are an incentive for additional supply of new housing. But if you increase the rents in older housing, you don't generate production of older housing. It doesn't work that way. So the result is higher rents in older housing result in a massive transfer of income from renters to real estate investors. They create a minced hardship for lower income tenants and they don't generate additional supply. When higher income tenants displaced low income tenants from existing lower housing, the displaced tenants ... you might say, "Oh here's a market for new housing." But they don't have what economists call effective demand. They have a need but they don't have enough money to support construction of new housing.

And ironically enough, when the higher income tenants displaced the lower income tenants and move into older housing perhaps somewhat upgraded for the expectations of higher income tenants, then they're less likely to be interested in moving into new housing. So you actually reduced the market for new housing construction. This may be part of the reason why there are many studies that show that modern rent controls do not reduce the construction of new housing at all. Now so how do we get more of these housing where the cost of construction are paid off and where rents are more affordable. Well one way is you wait while the new housing ages for 10 to 20 years and becomes older housing.

So in addition to needing to spend the next 20 years increasing the rate in which new housing is built, then we also need to wait another 20 years until that new housing ages and becomes older housing before it can reach the needs of even .... you know, not the lowest income, but even lower income tenants. So you're looking at a very long time horizon before the supply solution starts to really have an effect for most tenants.

Now another way to approach this is for government to subsidized the cost of construction which is what it does in supporting non-profit housing development. Pay off the capital cost of the new construction and the non-profit housing developer can rent the housing for basically the cost of operating and maintaining it. This takes a lot of money and it also takes a very long time.

Still another thing that can be done is to put some limits on the rent increases allowed in older housing for government regulations to step in where the market has failed. So then of course you get a great deal of uproar about what gives the public the right to regulate the prices that are charged by private investors for the use of their property. And now we need to look at another aspect of housing which is very important.

Housing is not just a building. Housing sits on a piece of a land that has a location and the demand for housing is based on that location as well as the building quality. We don't have a shortage of housing that is sort of the United States as a whole. We have a shortage of housing in places people want to be and the places where there are jobs. The places where the government provides roads, education, public safety, all the things that make life livable and positive. And in California's dense urban areas, the diversity generates a creative culture, increased productivity, and a strong economy. All those tech and bio tech companies didn't just emerge because there was a brilliant individual, no they emerged because there was a very creative culture in the San Francisco Bay area that lead to people interacting and coming up with ideas. Some of which failed and some of which worked spectacularly.

And which by the way were based on a lot of past government research that people then became privatize and made themselves billionaires with. So the housing market as it is currently structured allows real estate investors to convert this publicly created land value into private profit by charging higher rent for desirable locations. You know if you live in the Bay area and you rent, you pay a price of admission on top of what's actually necessary in order to operate and maintain rental housing. And we would reassert in this report, the public has moral and legal rights over the value that it creates.

And rent regulation is a necessary first step in restoring some equity to the housing market. So government need to regulate the rent increases in older housing that inflicts so much useless hardships and the appropriate economic model to look at is public utility regulation which allows a fair return on investment but does not allow the utility to use its' power in a non-competitive market to basically to exact excessive prices from consumers.

The current public policy debates that are taking place in California about the housing crisis tend to be focus on creating some ideal competitive market which goes against the nature of housing as a complex commodity that exists on land in locations. This ideal competitive housing market is very unlikely to ever be attain again in California. What we need to be focusing on instead of this long term effort to somehow restore the market is that our public policy discussion should give priority to relief of immediate suffering while we work in many ways on long term solutions. Rent control is an essential public policy for shaping the housing market in the public interest. And now I'm going to turn it back to Nicole for some concluding remarks.

Nicole Montojo: Thanks Steve. And so as Steve mentioned rent control is the only way to address the growing cost burden on renters at the speed and the scale that's needed right now and we must think about this in terms of sequencing. Leveraging rent control as a near term anchor for longer term efforts that we are going to continue working on over time and this is what we mean by a comprehensive policy approach. And in the report we refer to an emerging framework among researchers and advocates that refer to five key strategies that are needed within a comprehensive approach. And so these are protection, which rent control is a part of. Production of new housing, both market rate and affordable, that's appropriate for all income levels as needed. Preservation of existing affordable housing. Insuring power and equitable distribution of power and meaningful participation that leads to inclusive housing decision and also placement which refers to locating housing in areas in order to create equitable access to opportunity.

And so in this context rent control has a very specific and important function, it's cost effective. It's quickly implemented and it's immediate. And it has a direct response to the issues that we had outlined earlier. And so yes rent control has limits and we acknowledge that in the report. And we also assert that these limits can be addressed and they should be addressed. But rent control's benefits fair outweighs any possible disadvantages. And while there are claims about these disadvantages .... they're generally not supported by research. And these negative effects we're experiencing now, we argue and that we will experience are far greater. So the most important thing that I want you to walk away with today is that a comprehensive approach can't work without rent control. Yes we should keep building and that's how we'll be able to get to affordability in the long term but it will take a really long time and we cannot wait. So we're not building fast enough and filtering doesn't happen fast enough. And if we wait, it will be simply too late. And so if the goal is to create housing affordability for all and stability and progress for California as a state and stability for our economy, our environment, health, and also public systems, rent control must be part of the conversation and part of the solution moving forward. So I'll hand back over to Gerald.

Gerald Lenoir: Thank you Nicole and Stephen. Now we want to put-

Nicole Montojo: Oh sorry.

Gerald Lenoir: Go for it. Now we want to put a human face on the issues that we're discussing, so I'd like to welcome to the podium Helen Duffy who is a former school principal and with her husband, she owns two rental properties in West Oakland. Welcome Helen.

Helen Duffy: Thank you. Good morning everyone and thank you for being here. Let me know if the sound is working. Okay.

As Gerald said, my name is Helen Duffy. I'm a former educator, a retired educator and I'm also a small property owner in West Oakland. My husband and I rent out part of our duplex and we have another property down the street that we also rent. I have a pension but we depend on these properties as an important part of our retirement income. The Institute Report in one point says when full profits are being made in large part due to forces that have nothing do with the investment or the actions of the property owners. Tenants are effectively subsidizing landlords with rent payments above what a fully competitive market would allow landlords to charge.

I can vouch for this statement. I lived in my community for about 30 years now and at the time we moved in, mine was a largely working class African-American neighborhood with a lot of homeowners as well as renters. A lot of the homeowners were older people who ended up getting caught up in the mortgage crisis. Many of my neighbors' properties were bought up by wealthier folks who turn them into rental housing including some publicly traded corporations have bought quite a bit of foreclosed properties in Oakland that they have now turned into rental properties.

My husband and I were able to hang onto our home but we were dismayed by the changes in the neighborhood. We valued stability in our tenants and in our community. However, multiple landlords around us including some ... well I already said that. Okay. However, many of the landlords around us had significantly increased the rents over the last few years displaying many long time renters and short time residents. I know renters who've been faced with increases of 800 dollars a month, 1600 dollars a month, which were clearly designed to make it impossible for them to stay. It is not right. It is not in the public interest. These uncontrolled rents have led to the development of at least five tent encampments in my immediate neighborhood and it's hard to walk a child to school past these encampments and answers questions about why people have to live on the street. And why people who used to live in an apartments and houses now live in cars and RVs.

It harms people when they lose their homes. It harms the neighborhood as a whole as well. Four generations of my Godson's African American family grew up within a few blocks of my home, but due to the meteor rise in the cost of housing nearly every member of that family has had to leave Oakland in the last 12 years. Many commuting hours to jobs that used to not be very far away. It's been frustrating to watch these changes at the large turnover in my neighborhood as it feels less and less like a community.

People are more isolated from each other and newer residents with good jobs don't see how they can sit down roots with housing costs so high. I certainly have experienced that as a principal of an elementary school trying to hire teachers and then they could stay a couple of years but then either the rent went up or they just could see that they just couldn't get a foothold here and they went to other communities to work. It's a problem. It's a problem that goes way beyond housing. I believe that many fellow landlords didn't increase their rents because they had financial need or because they wanted to make improvements to their units. They did so purely for more profit.

They saw an increase in demand so they decided to raise rents. Now that's their right, I understand it but many of them did nothing to deserve the increase in income. They bought their homes for dirt cheap during the mortgage crisis ten years ago. And scarcity in housing has allowed them to raise rents in an uncontrolled manner.

My fellow landlords and I .... this is I think is really important. This state's constitution guarantees us as landlords that we are guaranteed a fair return on our investment. That's not something that any state law's going to take away. It's in the state's constitution. That guarantee continues under proposed rent control measure that's currently on the ballot or conceived of. We will continue to make a profit and we will continue to demand for our units. Anybody who tells you I'm not going to be able to rent my apartment if I have rent control, people won't want to buy it. Or ... anyway.

My husband and I bought our properties to have stability in our housing and in our economic future. It is only fair to give renters more stability as well. And we preserved a healthier community when we do so. Thank you.

Gerald Lenoir: Thank you Helen. Alright. Thank you Helen. Next we'll hear from Merika Reagan. She is a tenant of a single family home in East Oakland that is owned by Invitation Homes and she will share her personal story. Merika.

Merika Reagan: My name is Merika Reagan as he said. I was born and raised in San Francisco, so I'm a native and I've been here for 43 years. For the past decade or so I've been displaced from my home due to rising rents. For a brief time I lived on Treasure Island and from Treasure Island I move to El Cerrito. Each time the rent went up to a level I couldn't afford, I had to moved. I have lived in a single family home in East Oakland on 87th Avenue for four years now. The home is owned by Invitation Homes, which is a large corporation which has merged three times since I've been living there with other corporations. So they're growing beasts.

When I first moved in, I signed a two year lease and when that lease was up my rent went up by 50 dollars. I didn't love it but it seems reasonable, 50 dollars is not bad. It was doable. But I was only given the option of a one year lease with that 50 dollar increase. I didn't think much of it at the time. But at the end of that one year lease, I was no longer given an option of another two year lease. No, I was given an option of a two year lease with 1000 dollars a month increase.

Audience: Oh God!

Merika Reagan: Or I could do one year at 330 increase.

Audience: Damn.

Merika Reagan: Neither of which I could afford. So I'm thinking ... I already worked 12-14 hours a day. I'm thinking what am I going to work 24 hours just to try to not be homeless. And it's a reminder every day that I leave my house and drive to work, there's homeless encampments so it's a constant reminder ... go to work or join these guys. And I believe the corporations know this. If it wasn't for ACCE, a housing organization in the Bay area, I would be either homeless or living in another state right now. Because I was really contemplating moving to Texas with family, which I never wanted to do. Just to really be clear. But we were able to negotiate only a 70 dollar increase which is a huge relief. But my lease is up in May and I'm like, I don't know what's going to happen then. I don't know what ... I wonder is it even legal for them to not even offer me a lease at all.

Renters across California deserve some measure to protect us from the arbitrary rent increases that can displayed us from our homes. Right now local communities are prohibited from doing anything to protect me as I live in a single family home. I want businesses and landlords to be able to make a profit. But renters also deserve reasonable, understandable rent increases that rent control would provide. Thank you for letting me share my story.

Gerald Lenoir: So we've heard from our researchers on the report we heard from people in the community that are impacted by these uncontrolled rents. So let's take questions first from the media and then from people who are not in the media. Anyone from the media have a question?

Mic guy: [inaudible 00:37:32]

Gerald Lenoir: Pardon me?

Mic guy: We will get them all outside.

Gerald Lenoir: Okay. Any question from the audience? Yes?

Speaker 10: Can you say more about the means testing ... . What's the balance there?

Stephen Barton: One of the things that's often said about rent control is what ... well everybody benefits. All tenants no matter what their income, shouldn't this just be something aimed at low income tenants who really need the protection. Now I happen to be a homeowner and my energy bills from the Pacific Gas and Electric Company are regulated and yet nobody suggests, oh you know Steve, you and your wife have a pretty decent income in your retirement, you don't really need the public utilities commission to hold down the cost of your gas and electricity. People understand that there's a situation in which there is no market holding down the cost of gas and electricity and that what the utility is entitled to is a fair return on its investment.

Stephen Barton: So similarly I think on the case of rental housing, landlords are entitled to a fair return on their investments. They're not entitled to exact additional rent from tenants. There's also of course a very practical objection which is when ... if you did something like that you would create an enormous incentive not to rent to low income tenants and they would absolutely do their best to find tenants whose incomes were above whatever the threshold so that the rents that they charge were not controlled.

Stephen Barton: So we recognized that it's important to focus resources and assistance on the lower income people who need it the most. But at the same time the nature of rent control is such that's not an appropriate approach.

Gerald Lenoir: Okay, any other questions? Yes? Let's go here and then there.

Speaker 11: I have a question about the notion that we can't put a control on new construction. And my question specifically is on the rent stabilization, not strict rent control. But if you put a new unit and you're deciding what you should rent of 2500 dollars for example, you already anticipated what the costs are to get a return ... and probably beyond a fair return. And then I'm not clear why stabilization would hinder [inaudible 00:41:01] . Because [inaudible 00:41:03] different and when they're creating their amount of money that they're anticipating they could make, I'm not sure why it would be anything different than the rent that they can do. So I ask why ... I understand why you would do vacancy control on new construction but it seems like the actual policy that would reflect both their needs and good public policy in the public interest could be stabilized.

Stephen Barton: Yes. Well I understand the approach you're suggesting. I think this actually relates back to some extent to the previous question because one of the options that are in front of communities when they're deciding on rent control is for example to potentially have a luxury exemption to say that rent that are in the top ten percent for example would be an exempt from rent control. Basically on the grounds that those units would be occupied by the highest income tenants and also because that would pretty much overlap with new construction. So you're kind of balancing the desire to create this incentive for new construction with the desire to have stability on the part of the tenants who move into even these higher income units. And that's really a decision that local communities have to make. They have to have that conversation. What we're really saying is right now too much of a conversation just is focused on an idealized market and rules out of order having a serious conversation what can you do to protect tenants now.

We're not trying to say that there's a particular form of rent control that is absolutely the right way to do it. What we're saying is local communities need to have that conversation about what's going to work, what's going to help tenants in their community so that they can do at least some moderation of the level of suffering that's taking place now.

Gerald Lenoir: K, we'll take one more question right here. And then we will try to wrap it up. Go ahead.

Speaker 12: Sure. So my question is if you know of any research on documenting the rise [inaudible 00:44:06] to the growth of not just mom and pop [inaudible 00:44:11] but these corporations who are increasingly becoming landlords themselves. Do you know any research sort of documenting that change [inaudible 00:44:24]?

Nicole Montojo: Sure. I know that's there's a report by working partnerships on this. It looks at the rise of the single family corporate landlord. I might put that question out to the group because I know there's a lot of folks who are also experts in this and might know of more. But that one is a fairly recent report that's really great and covers that exact topic.

Speaker 12: Can you say it again.

Nicole Montojo: I have to check on the exact title but it's by Working Partnerships and I think it's called, The Rise of The Single Family Landlord.

Gerald Lenoir: Okay. Alright. I think I'm going to have to close up now. I just want to say that any questions about the report can be directed to sam@telegraphpr.com. The report is also located on the Haas Institute website at belonging.berkeley.edu. So thank you for coming out and I hope you can utilize this report in advocating for affordable housing. Thank you.