No Plan to Drop Rent Control, Top Official Says : Economy: Housing Department chief responds to assistant who said restrictions may be unnecessary.

The head of the Los Angeles Housing Department said Thursday that rent control continues to provide economic benefits to tenants and “there are no plans afoot to eliminate” it.

General Manager Gary Squier was responding to published comments of a top assistant, Barbara Zeidman, that the controls may be unnecessary in today’s depressed real estate market.

Squier said preliminary findings in the Housing Department’s study of rent control show that an average tenant in a rent-controlled building paid $8 a month less last year than a tenant in a similar apartment that was not regulated. The differential was $20 a month in 1987. “But it’s still significant,” he said.

The decline is traceable to rents that have dropped during the recession in uncontrolled apartments--those built after the rent control law took effect in 1978.

Renters who have been in their current apartments since 1978 enjoy the highest benefits because their rents went up only gradually during the 1980s.

Many of those long-term renters are people on fixed incomes who would have difficulty adjusting to the sharp increases in free-market rents that many economists expect once the recession ends.

Squier said his department is two months away from concluding its rent control study and presenting a range of options to the Rent Adjustment Commission and the City Council.

“We have to consider the full range of options by law,” he said. “Is it (rent control) still working? Does it provide a benefit? Should it be changed? How should it be changed? . . . We’ll present options. . . . The policy is in their hands.”

But Squier said he believes rent control “still is providing a benefit.”

Zeidman had said in a recent interview that she “would like to decrease” rent controls while increasing eviction protections for tenants. The Los Angeles rent control law limits rent increases to 3% to 8% a year--depending on the rate of inflation. This year the allowable rate is 3%.

“That right now does not seem to have a lot of value,” Zeidman said.

Zeidman could not be reached for further comment Thursday.

In the earlier interview, she said the controls are not appreciably helping many renters because a high vacancy rate has caused rents to decline in uncontrolled apartments.

But, she said, the controls “may be creating damage” to the city’s aging housing stock by making it harder for some landlords to maintain their buildings.

Landlords complain that the law hurts them financially because it limits their ability to pass along the costs of capital improvements--such as new roofs or earthquake damage repairs--to tenants.