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SLO repeals rental ordinance, considers nondiscrimination

March 23, 2017

A stack of 1,560 pages of signed petitions.

The San Luis Obispo City Council repealed the city’s controversial rental inspection ordinance on Tuesday. However, the council did not adopt a nondiscrimination in housing ordinance and instead voted to allow 30 days for city staff to analyze the proposed ordinance’s potential impacts.

In 2015, the previous city council adopted the rental inspection ordinance that allowed an inspector to enter and examine rental units to determine if the properties were safe and habitable. The ordinance also required landlords to pay a fee to fund the program.

Last year, former councilman Dan Carpenter, attorney Stew Jenkins and Dan Knight filed a petition to repeal the inspection ordinance and replace it with a nondiscrimination in housing ordinance. About of third of the city’s registered voters signed the petition which left the city with the choice of repealing the inspection ordinance and adopting the nondiscrimination ordinance or holding a special election on the matter within 180 days. A special election would cost between $119,000 and $158,000.

The nondiscrimination ordinance would help safeguard against the city council replacing the previous rental inspection ordinance with another discriminatory rental inspection ordinance.

The nondiscrimination in housing ordinance does not allow the city to “discriminate against any person based upon age, income, disability, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual identity, or inability or ability to own a home, by imposing any compulsory program, policy, intrusion applicable to any residential dwelling unit.”

City Attorney Christine Dietrick wanted 30 days to determine the potential impacts the nondiscrimination ordinance could have on the city’s housing programs.

At an April 18 council meeting, the council is slated to vote on whether to adopt the nondiscrimination in housing ordinance or to call for a special election to be held in August.


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And you can’t discriminate based on income????? How about if you are making $1500 a month and want to rent an apartment for $2000 per month? Does that mean that you are entitled to it?

Can you ace out another well qualified applicant making $6000 per month?


This new ordinance goes beyond nondiscrimination. It basically means the government is taking over private property my making the landlord/owner provide housing for everyone regardless of means to pay for it!


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The staff should be fired and money saved used to refund those who already had to pay into this scam.


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And the people hired to support this ordinance are being fired when?????


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Of course we would save more money by firing some top staff. It’s no fault of the underlings.

I hope the council does the right thing and adopt everything the petitions were about. The hated inspection ordinance was imposed on us despite fierce opposition, typical bad government by the previous council.


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It may been a “revious” council that voted the ordinance in but many current staff and a city manager were responsible for giving it life in the beginning. We now know that Mayor Harmon is just as afraid of Lichtig as Marx was.


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