Rental Housing Board Seeks Alternate Tenant Member Before Thursday Deadline

Pasadena is looking for a renter to fill a vacant seat on the Rental Housing Board with applications due July 9.

The opening and the deadline, announced by Rent Stabilization Director Helen Morales in the City Manager’s weekly newsletter, is for an alternate tenant member who would serve the remainder of a term running through May 24, 2027. An alternate may take part in board discussions but votes only when a primary tenant member is absent. The newsletter framed the vacancy as a chance to shape rent-stabilization policy but left out the board’s origins: it exists because of Measure H, a 2022 ballot measure that landlords challenged in court for nearly three years.

The board administers Article XVIII of the City Charter, the Pasadena Fair and Equitable Housing Charter Amendment, which voters approved as Measure H in November 2022 and which took effect that December. The measure rolled rents back to May 2021 levels for existing tenants, capped annual increases at 75% of inflation and created the 11-member board — seven tenant members, one from each council district, plus four at-large members and two alternates — with authority over rent increases, petitions, enforcement and the city’s rental registry.

The board sets an annual cap known as the Annual General Adjustment. For the current 12-month cycle it limited increases to 2.25%, well below California’s statewide ceiling under Assembly Bill 1482. The rules cover roughly 25,000 older multifamily units — generally those built before February 1995, the cutoff set by the state’s Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act — and landlords must register each unit and pay a fee, most recently $238 per unit, to raise rents at all.

The board the city is now recruiting for was itself the subject of a lengthy legal fight. Days after Measure H passed with 53.8% of the vote, the California Apartment Association and several landlords sued to overturn it, challenging among other things the requirement that a supermajority of board seats go to tenants — the very category of seat now open. A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge upheld most of the measure in 2023, and in 2025 the California Court of Appeal affirmed the tenant-majority board and the rent caps while striking down two provisions, including a relocation-payment requirement the court found conflicted with state law.

To qualify, applicants and their extended families must not have owned, managed or held a 5% or greater stake in Los Angeles County rental units in the three years before applying or at any time after appointment, the newsletter said.

Applicants must submit an application, a financial-interest declaration and a nominating petition with at least 25 signatures from residents of the same council district. Materials are available from the City Clerk’s Office at 100 N. Garfield Ave., Room S228, or by calling (626) 744-4124. The application period closes July 9.