Santa Cruz Sentinel: Santa Cruz rent control campaign on track to make ballot, organizers say

Costanza Rampini is collecting signatures to put the Santa Cruz rent control measure on the fall ballot. The 32-year-old adjunct professor at San Jose State has spent the better part of her efforts knocking on doors, standing in front of coffee shops and grocery stores. She knows how important the measure is to people who rent because there have been times where she spent 80 percent of her income on rent. “I don’t make the money of an engineer, so it’s been really hard,” she said. She’s one of 100 to 150 volunteers pounding the pavement each week with Movement for Housing Justice, a grassroots campaign aimed implementing a rent control measure for the City of Santa Cruz. Through Rampini’s nine years in Santa Cruz — as a student who earned a doctorate in environmental studies from UC Santa Cruz and now as a lecturer who teaches climate change — she’s rented rooms and seen the landscape slowly shift. When she arrived, her rent for a room in a three-bedroom home was $875. She saw her rent climb higher and higher each year until her landlord finally asked for close to $1,300 a month.