Santa Monica Braces for End of Rent Control : Housing: Expected change will allow large increases when vacancies occur. Tenants who hoped to move to larger units express disappointment.

Rent control has been as much a balm to Santa Monica as the cool ocean breezes.

While apartment dwellers elsewhere come and go, the lucky inhabitants of rent-controlled apartments in Santa Monica have raised their children there, sheltered their cats and dogs, and grown old there.

And they hold on to their apartments--where significant rent increases have been banned for the last 16 years, even when tenants move out--as if they were homesteads. Even marriage doesn’t always break the bonds between renter and apartment. Film industry union representative Lyle Trachtenberg, a renter for a dozen years, has held on to his apartment--even though he married Whoopi Goldberg last October and doesn’t live in the apartment anymore, according to his upstairs neighbor who sees him checking his mail and his plants.

Now Santa Monica’s rent-controlled dwellers have even less reason to leave their apartments, since both houses of the Legislature passed a bill Monday allowing landlords to begin substantially raising rents when apartments are vacated and new tenants move in. The “vacancy decontrol” law, slated to take effect Jan. 1 after Gov. Pete Wilson’s expected signature, will have a similar effect on West Hollywood’s tough rent control law and those in three other California cities.

On Tuesday, renters who have lived under the protection of the controls were both troubled and resigned to the change.

“I’m kind of sorry to see it’s [rent] going up little by little,” said massage therapist Helena Penkov, a 21-year resident of one Santa Monica building and Lyle Trachtenberg’s upstairs neighbor. “It helps people without a lot of money,” said the Hungarian-born Penkov, who shares her apartment with her husband, a contractor, and two huge cats, Sidney and Bettina. “Not everyone in Santa Monica is a movie star.”

And though Lexus-driving lawyers and screenwriters have wrangled low-priced apartment finds, supporters say the rent-control laws continue to do what they were intended to--provide modestly priced apartments to modest wage earners and denizens of the middle class.

“It hasn’t been rich people, but senior citizens, middle- and low-income people who have benefited from rent control,” said Nancy Greenstein, chairwoman of Santa Monicans for Renters Rights, the group that sponsored the 1979 ballot measure that created rent control. “Rent control has allowed Santa Monica to have a multiethnic, multi-income face.”

Santa Monica adopted tough controls after a wave of conversion of apartments to condominiums cut the supply of apartments and rents surged higher.

Los Angeles has a city rent control that has limited annual increases to between 3% and 8% a year, with no limits on rent increases for new tenants. Under the new state law, landlords in Santa Monica and West Hollywood will gradually regain the same freedom.

They will be allowed to raise rents for newly rented apartments by 15% during the first year and another 15% in the second year. During the third year the rent can be raised to full market value and the unit rented to new tenants without restrictions thereafter. Annual increases in Santa Monica and West Hollywood will still be locally regulated, as Los Angeles is now.

Penkov--who counts a hairdresser, a cancer-stricken elderly man and an accountant among her neighbors--has lived in Santa Monica since 1970, when she was a factory worker making $1.29 an hour.

“There are lots of elderly people, lots of young people--and some who could probably afford to pay a little more,” said Lynn Murphy, a 26-year-old physical education teacher at Brentwood School, who has a $606 a month one-bedroom apartment on Santa Monica’s 6th Street. “But you walk around Brentwood--everyone there looks the same.”

Murphy has mixed feelings about the vacancy decontrol.

“As long as I stay in this apartment, I’m fine,” she said. “But I was hoping to take the apartment upstairs because it’s bigger.” She surmises that by the time her neighbors leave, the new rent law will probably be in effect.

“I know my landlord will increase it because she tells me all the time that she doesn’t have enough money to do things to the building. The only up side of this that I can see is that maybe my landlord will be more willing to do things to the building--like fixing leaks.”

The passage of the law did nothing to solve the age-old debate between landlords and tenants about the legacy of rent control.

Robert Sullivan, spokesman for the Greater Los Angeles Apartment Owners Assn., said that rent control did little to protect the poor. Instead, he argued, Santa Monica has become more elite and affluent.

“The unfortunate thing about rent control is that it subsidized people who didn’t need it,” he said, contending that only those with money and connections were getting the much-sought-after low-rent apartments.

“Tenants with rent-controlled apartments were selling their keys [subleasing the unit] and landlords were charging fees [under the table] to rent apartments,” he said. “No one has a problem with programs that help the truly needy, but it’s the truly greedy that have been benefiting from rent control.”

That, answered Mary Ann Yurkonis, administrator of Santa Monica’s rent control board, is “the big lie. Contrary to the allegation that everyone who moves to Santa Monica is a yuppie, the census figures don’t show that.” She said more than a quarter of the city’s renters--27%--were considered “very low income” in the 1990 census.

Some renters were actually sympathetic to Santa Monica landlords’ longtime complaints about issues including the city’s limitations on rent increases to pay for building improvements.

“I’ve been living in Santa Monica since 1976 and have enjoyed a two-bedroom, two-bath spacious apartment that cost $350 when I moved in and is now $700 something,” mused Judith Desjardins, a 51-year-old clinical social worker and part time actress who paused on her in-line skates.

“I’ve watched my landlord all those years, I watched him go through a period when he was demoralized over rent control. He was barely fixing things. . . . Although I belong to Santa Monicans for Renters Rights, I also believe in the fairness of landlords to be able to raise the rates of vacated apartments to fair market value.”

Not that she will be leaving any time soon. Desjardins raised two children, now grown and on their own, and got married a couple of years ago to a man with a Canoga Park condo. So now she spends her nights with her husband in Canoga Park and her days working out of her Santa Monica apartment with her cat, Monty. (“He has his friends over,” she laughed.)

But for many in rent-controlled apartments now, the new law leaves them trapped.

“It’s rotten,” said a photographer who lives in a rent-controlled apartment with her husband and two small children. They pay $1,016 for a two-bedroom unit six blocks from the beach, and she now feels it would be difficult to afford anything bigger. “It’ll just make finding what we want harder. It’s hard enough now to find rent-controlled apartments that are larger than one bedroom.”