San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan is throwing his support behind a proposed ordinance to help low-income tenants in San Jose stay in their neighborhoods.
This week, the mayor and community leaders gathered in Mayfair, a historically Latino neighborhood east of downtown whose residents have seen rapid change, to support a new “Tenant Preference” policy, which the City Council is set to vote on on March 26.
Under the proposed ordinance, 20% of affordable apartments in city-funded properties would be reserved for lower-income applicants who live in census tracts that the city deems “high-displacement” areas. Additionally, 15% of affordable apartments would be set aside for lower-income applicants living within the same City Council district as the available affordable housing units.
“We can’t continue to allow displacement to tear apart families and communities in the Bay Area,” Mahan said.
Skyrocketing rents have put pressure on San Jose’s working-class families. A market-rate one-bedroom apartment in San Jose now goes for $2,359 a month, compared to $1,207 nationwide, according to rental listing site Apartment List.
Maria Chavez, a Mayfair resident, lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Mayfair — two of her three children sleep in the bedroom, while she and her husband and youngest child sleep in the living room. “I had lost hope that I could give my family a decent life,” she said in Spanish through a translator. But she called the tenant protection ordinance a “light at the end of the tunnel” that she hopes will give her family the opportunity to stay in Mayfair.
“We are a community that has endured years of social and racial inequities,” Maritza Maldonado, executive director of Mayfair-based nonprofit Amigos de Guadalupe, said during the press conference. “We have witnessed our families, our friends, our neighbors, make the difficult decision to move their families away from a place they have known for generations, all because they can no longer afford to live here.”
Community organizations like Maldonado’s, as well as SOMOS Mayfair and Vecinos Activos have advocated for a tenant preference policy since 2017, but it required a change in state law, which came in 2022.
Other cities in the region, like Oakland and San Francisco, also reserve certain affordable units for their own residents — but San Jose is the only city to propose a policy focused on protecting residents specifically from high-displacement areas.
The city is far behind on its affordable housing goals. The city aims to build 62,000 housing units by 2031, with nearly 15,000 of those dedicated to families making below 50% of the area median income – about $90,650 for a family of four in Santa Clara County. Of the 5,599 units the city added between 2018 and 2022, just 14% were reserved for those making below median income.
“We need many more affordable housing developments like these in Mayfair and other communities,” Maldonado said, “so that families don’t have to choose between homelessness and leaving the community they have known for decades.”