Anaheim voters will not see a rent control measure on their ballots this November. Tenants United Anaheim, the group that spent months gathering signatures for a citizen-led rent stabilization initiative, has suspended its petition drive so organizers can rewrite parts of the measure before trying again. The group had been pushing to cap annual rent increases in Anaheim at 3 percent, far below what state law currently allows.
A Signature Drive That Ran Out of Time
According to LAist, Orange County had a fixed deadline for submitting ballot initiatives ahead of the November election. Tenants United Anaheim launched its campaign in January, aiming to collect roughly 18,000 valid signatures from registered Anaheim voters within a 180-day window, according to the California Apartment Association, the landlord trade group that has opposed rent control efforts in both Anaheim and Santa Ana.
Rather than push forward with language organizers considered vulnerable, Tenants United Anaheim suspended its signature-gathering to improve and strengthen the ballot measure's text, the outlet reports. The group expects to resume the rent control effort for a future election.
Court Rulings Upended the Relocation Clause
The original proposal would have required landlords to pay relocation assistance to tenants forced to move through no fault of their own — a provision that ran into a string of unfavorable court rulings. In December 2025, the California Second District Court of Appeal ruled in California Apartment Association v. City of Pasadena that requiring landlords to pay relocation assistance for lawful rent increases on properties exempt from the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act violates state law, a decision the California Supreme Court declined to review in April, according to Pasadena Now.
The same appellate panel struck down a similar Los Angeles ordinance on April 15, 2026, and the city has since stripped mandatory rent-increase relocation disclosures from its official renter notices, according to Taksa Investment Group. Los Angeles and Pasadena both stopped enforcing their relocation mandates after those landlord-group victories, the same report notes, leaving Anaheim's similar clause on shaky legal ground.
State Caps Already Dwarf the 3% Anaheim Renters Wanted
Without local rent control, Anaheim tenants rely on the statewide cap under the Tenant Protection Act, known as AB 1482, which allowed increases up to 8.0% through July 31 and rises to 8.7% for Orange County units starting August 1, according to Newsweek. That ceiling is far above the 3% cap Tenants United Anaheim wanted, and even above neighboring Santa Ana's own limit. Santa Ana adopted rent control in 2021, and voters enshrined it in the city charter through Measure CC in November 2024; per TrueDoor PM, that ordinance caps increases on covered units at 2.42% for the period running from September 2025 through August 2026.
California's 1995 Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act exempts single-family homes, condos and apartments built after February 1, 1995 from local rent caps, and guarantees landlords the right to reset rents to market rate between tenancies, according to the California Department of Justice. That statute is a core reason cities can't simply impose blanket rent control, and statewide voters have rejected repeal efforts three times since 2018 — including Proposition 10 that year, Proposition 21 in 2020, and Proposition 33 in November 2024, per Ballotpedia. Santa Ana is likely to remain the only Orange County city with rent control, the outlet notes.
Renters Make Up Anaheim's Majority — and a 2028 Rematch
More than 53% of Anaheim's 106,317 households are tenant-occupied, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, in a city of more than 344,000 residents that is Orange County's most populous. Beyond the rent cap, the group's draft ordinance also sought to bar landlords from evicting households with minor children or educators working in Anaheim school districts during the active school year, according to Tenants United Anaheim. The California Apartment Association has opposed both that provision and the broader rent cap push in Anaheim and Santa Ana.
Tenants United Anaheim members now hope a revised version of their measure will make it onto the 2028 ballot instead, the outlet reports. For now, the roughly 344,000 residents of Anaheim — most of them renters — remain governed by the state's higher caps rather than any local rent stabilization rule.
