Residents of neighborhoods near colleges could have yet another tool in the fight against mini-dorms in the form of a rooming-house ordinance penned by City Attorney Michael Aguirre’s office. The ordinance aims to prevent the commercialization of properties zoned for single-family residences.
Deputy City Attorney Marianne Greene presented a draft of the ordinance Aug. 16 during a meeting of the Peninsula Community Planning Board.
As proposed, any landlord renting three or more rooms on three or more separate leases in a single-family residential zone would potentially violate the ordinance, Greene said. The ordinance, as written, would also set a “phase-out” period of seven years during which already established rooming houses would be terminated seven years from the date the ordinance is approved.
The city’s Planning Commission is scheduled to hear the ordinance in council chambers on Thursday, Sept. 6, at 9 a.m. The legislation could come before the City Council in October, Greene said.
But before city officials can OK the ordinance, local residents and planning board members took the opportunity to ask the deputy city attorney some tough questions.
“There’s a lot of loopholes certainly landlords can use to skirt around the issue, but how does the city attorney intend to enforce it since leases are not public record?” asked Suhail Kahlil, a Peninsula Community Planning Board member.
Greene said code enforcement officials can, in some cases, subpoena leases to investigate a potential violation. She said investigations start with a complaint call to city officials.
However, other variations of the mini-dorm would still be allowed to exist under the ordinance.
A group of friends or students who live together under one lease would likely be immune from the ordinance because they may fit a legal definition of a what constitutes a “family” ” allowing them to live in a single-family residential zone.
Greene said the ordinance was crafted specifically to address the commercialization of single-family residential zones and cannot discriminate against renters.
But landlords who specifically try to circumvent the potential ordinance could run into problems.
“If an owner or operator is attempting to evade the ordinance under the guise of a common lease ” but is operating a rooming house under every other respect ” then that would potentially violate the ordinance,” Greene said in a later phone interview.
If approved by city officials, the ordinance would be another tool communities could use to control mini-dorm proliferation.
Pacific Beach and several communities near San Diego State University have implemented the CAPP program to curb chronic house parties and public behavioral problems. Under the program, residences that force police to return on a noise complaint more than twice in a night can be “CAPP’d” and each resident fined $1,000.
Residents can also report potential violations to the Department of Neighborhood Code Compliance, (619) 236-5500.