From the President
by Eric Andresen
It is October again, and we are hearing that same old line: “this election is going to be an important one!” How many times have you heard that? Actually every election is an important one in its own way. There are always serious issues for us to review and vote on, and there are always decisions under consideration that will impact our rental housing industry in one way or another.
All this leads me to the point I have been driving home for the past two-and-a-half years as president of the San Francisco Apartment Association. Your involvement in local, state and national politics is a requirement for being in the rental income business. The impact that politics play on our industry is enormous. As you have discovered, the first step in your involvement is for you to recognize how you are affected by politics, which is clearly the case for each and every one of us as rental property owners in San Francisco.
I have been teaching my clients to look at political involvement as another form of insurance. Each year, a good many of them make a single donation, usually $25 per unit, which my firm then divides up between the various associations and political action committees (PACs) that benefit the rental housing industry.
In a sense, each of you participates in a similar manner through donations to our own SFAA and CAA PACs—provided you actually elect to make a donation (although a disturbing number of our members do not). The problem is that the amount requested with the annual renewals is nowhere near what most of you should donate in order to have an impact on your own future.
What should each of you do? Well, for openers, think about what a revised Rent Board would have cost you had the recently proposed measure for board revision made it onto the ballot and then met with voter approval. Can you imagine the decisions that would have come out of a board that was at least 65 percent tenant representatives? To calculate what the expenses could have been is almost impossible, but there is absolutely no question it would have cost you a lot more than $25 per unit per year. In my mind, this single issue alone makes aggressive and active participation from each one of you a no-brainer.
Here is another consideration: each of us spends a significant amount of money on insurance every year. We seem to make these payments without much thought, but how much return do we actually get from the dollars we spend? If we are lucky, most of us do not get any of it back. However, why is it we so willingly make these payments, without much payoff, and yet fail to make donations that have an obvious and justifiable benefit? There is a twisted mindset here that, in my opinion, must change.
Now, with this year’s election cycle fast approaching, I challenge each of you to reconsider your level of participation. I am willing to wager that very few of us ever donate anywhere near enough money to make up for the return that we gain in the form of revised and blocked legislation, or the advantages we get from putting someone reasonable and reliable in an elective office. From this year forward, pay attention to what we report to you, make a more careful calculation of the current benefit and then write significant and meaningful checks to the various organizations and PACs that represent the rental housing industry.
Participation in our legislative and political processes is a vital part of protecting and preserving of our property investments. The sooner we all recognize this incredible value and make the commitment to fund our programs as if they were another form of required insurance, the sooner we will begin to see some effective changes take place, rather than the piecemeal changes we have had to endure over the years.
The future is yours for the making. Your level of commitment is what determines just how far we go. Please, decide to make a bigger difference—today.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of the SFAA or the San Francisco Apartment Magazine. Eric Andresen is the current president of the SFAA, the vice president of CAA, a past president of the PPMA and the original author of the PPMA Residential Tenancy Agreement. Eric owns and operates both West Coast Property Management and West Coast Property Maintenance Company. He can be reached at eric@wcpm.com. Copyright © 2004 by the San Francisco Apartment Magazine. All rights reserved.