Quick Take
Santa Cruz's rental inspection program was created to protect tenants from unsafe housing, but property owner Darius Mohsenin argues it has evolved into a system focused more on permits, paperwork and minor violations than actual habitability. He contends that inspectors increasingly rely on bureaucratic enforcement rather than practical safety expertise, allowing complaints to trigger sweeping property inspections and costly citations. He urges the Santa Cruz City Council to refocus the program on genuine health and safety issues instead of what he sees as regulatory overreach that raises housing costs and strains relationships with property owners.
Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.
When the City of Santa Cruz first proposed the residential rental inspection program (RRIP) in 2010, the promise was simple: to ensure that the city’s aging housing stock remained habitable and safe for tenants.
But what was intended as a shield against serious health and safety violations has gradually become a tool for regulatory overreach. Inspections can now be triggered by meritless complaints, and property owners can face costly penalties for minor technical violations that have little bearing on habitability or tenant welfare.
Perhaps the most frustrating shift in the program is the decline in actual field expertise. In years past, code enforcement inspectors were seasoned professionals — individuals with a practical knowledge of building codes. They could walk into a mechanical room and actually recognize whether a water heater, furnace, or stove was safe. They offered appropriate, safety-based recommendations that truly protected the inhabitants.
Today, that expertise has been replaced by a “clerical” mentality.
Instead of evaluating installation integrity, current inspectors now scan a database to see if a permit was issued. It doesn’t matter if an appliance has been running flawlessly and safely for over a decade; if the digital paper trail is missing, it is deemed a violation. This shift from physical safety assessment to bureaucratic record-checking serves the city’s ledger, not the tenant’s safety.
The city’s own residential rental inspection program self-inspection checklist stands as a sane, logical basis for health and safety. It itemizes clear, objective standards for habitability: hot/cold running water, smoke alarms and heat.
Crucially, nowhere on this checklist does it state that a permit is required for existing units or appliances.
For example, Item 1.11 regarding water heaters explicitly requires “proper strapping, proper drain lines, and venting.” This is a functional safety standard. Yet, inspectors now ignore these physical criteria in favor of a rigid, revenue-driving permit hunt.
During the program’s inception, then-councilmembers Mike Rotkin and Neal Coonerty specifically discussed issues such as water heaters that didn’t have permits on file. Rental inspectors were not looking for permits; they were looking for safe installations. Today, that common-sense practice has been discarded, and the checklist is being treated as a mere suggestion rather than the governing standard.
The original intent of the ordinance was to proactively identify substandard and unsafe buildings. Yet, recent enforcement actions suggest a shift toward a “dragnet” approach. For instance, a tenant with severe mental health challenges – she claimed people were injecting poison gas into a range hood vent from the attic – triggered a propertywide inspection of one of my apartment buildings. Inspectors used the complaint to examine the entire property in a search for violations no matter how minor.
This “fishing expedition” resulted in citations for trivial items like a missing cover plate — often removed by tenants themselves to install plug adapters — and culminated in a mind-boggling display of bureaucratic overreach where my father-and-son tiny home on wheels project was red-tagged for lack of a building permit — even though the building department can’t even issue a permit. The city then dug into the archives to unearth a zoning regulation dating back to when the Beatles broke up showing that the unusable space the tiny home was parked on is for “common tenant use.”
According to the city, I can’t store my vehicle at my own apartment building.
Sadly, the rental inspection program also now enables personal vendettas. The city currently accepts complaints without vetting their authenticity, creating a system that can be weaponized by tenants holding a grudge or in the process of being evicted. These mostly baseless issues – sometimes even caused by the tenant themselves – are used to force a city-mandated walkthrough.
I understand the job inspectors have to do, but the City of Santa Cruz should return to the program’s primary goal: habitability.
When the city uses inspections to demand permits for safe, decades-old appliances, issues citations for minor cosmetic or non-health-related issues, dredges up ancient zoning rules to restrict owners’ use of their property, or turns a single-unit complaint into propertywide searches, it doesn’t make tenants safer; it simply makes housing more expensive and the relationship between the city and its housing providers more adversarial.
It is time for the city council to rein in this overreach and ensure the rental inspection program and code enforcement in general is a tool for safety, not a trap for property owners.
It’s time for the “Taxman” to “Get Back” to where we were before.
Darius Mohsenin has been a Santa Cruz real estate investor since he purchased his first triplex in 1986 and owns a portfolio of rental properties in Santa Cruz, Monterey and Solano counties. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and worked in the defense/intel industry at multiple companies in Silicon Valley. He is currently a second-year law student at Monterey College of Law and intends to provide low-/no-cost legal services to low-income tenants and landlords upon passing the bar.
