Gabriela Rays Wahba

Department: Economics

Faculty Mentor: Elena Pastorino, Research Fellow, Hoover Institution

Protecting renters

Cities across California that face housing affordability crises have explored ways to protect vulnerable residents such as rent control policies. This protects long-term tenants from steep rent increases — but it also means landlords who want to move a tenant out have limited options: pursue a formal eviction, which can cause long-term harm to families, or offer tenants cash to leave voluntarily, a practice known as a 'buyout' or 'cash for keys.' Buyouts are increasingly common, but almost nothing is known about whether they actually protect tenants or simply displace them more quietly. By partnering with the San Francisco Rent Board and Oakland’s Rent Adjustment Program and leveraging large datasets to track where tenants end up after buyouts and evictions, this research will produce the first systematic evidence on how these two paths compare — and what better buyout policy could look like for California cities.