"Landlords operate on very thin margins in Santa Barbara." That's the first of many unsupported claims made in the Voice titled "Rent Control Will Harm the Poor" in last week's paper. Not just unsupported, in my experience laughably untrue.
My landlords have been consistently and significantly in the black, a circumstance that's not hard to achieve when the house has been owned for more than a few years.
Oh, but wait, his bio says the author, Jeffrey Harding, is a real estate investor and adjunct real-estate investment professor. The author's concerns are driven by a "real estate as an investment" agenda, not "real estate as a place to live."