Landlord Group Says It Delivered Enough Signatures to Earn Pasadena Rent Law Overhaul a 2028 Ballot Spot

[Updated with correction]    By late morning Wednesday, the temperature outside City Hall had climbed toward 102 degrees, but in the ramps and hallways, nearly two dozen supporters of a campaign to overhaul the city’s rent stabilization law were sweating for a different reason: hauling boxes.

Members of Pasadena Housing Providers, a group of local landlords, wheeled and carried 17 file boxes up ramps and into an elevator, delivering them to the City Clerk’s office, the culmination of a months-long signature drive to place a measure repealing and replacing Measure H, the city’s tenant-protection charter amendment, before voters.

Blake Boyd, a Pasadena landlord who co-founded the group, said the group had collected more than 29,000 signatures in all, well beyond the roughly 13,700 required to qualify a ballot measure, though only those the group verified as accurate — roughly 20,000 to 25,000, by its own estimate — will now be checked by the City Clerk and, eventually, Los Angeles County election officials.

“We think we’ve got about 20,000 that are verified, that are accurate,” he said. “We’re very, very confident in the 20,000 number that we have.”

“We’re not compromising tenant protections at all for those living in multi-family properties,” Boyd said, adding later that landlords “need to abide by certain regulations that protect the tenants.”

Central to the campaign’s argument is the makeup of the city’s rental housing board, which Measure H created. Under the current charter language, Article 18, seven seats are specifically required to be held by tenants with no material interest in rental property, while the other four are at-large seats that may be held by landlords/property owners, tenants, or other eligible Pasadena residents.

Boyd said commissioned polling — conducted twice, he said, specifically to gauge public opinion rather than industry preference — found that 82 percent of respondents favored or strongly favored a board evenly split between tenants and landlords.

“We wanted to know what the registered voter of Pasadena wanted,” Boyd said. “Not what landlords wanted, not what commercial interests wanted.”

Because of the time spent on polling, organizers are targeting the March 2028 municipal election, about a year and a half away, to put the replacement measure before voters.

Boyd framed the effort in terms of the health of the city’s middle class.

“So goes the middle class, so goes society,” he said. “Pasadena Housing Providers believes in protecting the middle class.”

By Wednesday afternoon, the City Clerk’s office had already begun sorting through the submission.

Simon Gibbons, another co-founder of Pasadena Housing Providers, said the office had approved 16,482 signatures as “plausible” — but that count covered only 11 of the 17 boxes turned in.

“That only covered the first 11 of 17 file boxes,” Gibbons said. “We estimate that the remaining five large boxes would have brought the total to over 25,000. In total we handed in over 29,000 signatures.”

The petitions will now be sent to the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder for a full count and a check against voter rolls, he said. Gibbons put the group’s official qualifying threshold at 13,745 signatures — the “target number” it needed to clear.

Pasadena City Clerk Mark Jomsky did not immediately respond to a request for information about the signatures’ delivery.