Oakland, CA - rent control - base year - fair return?!

[Joseph Miguel]

What is oaklands 'base year' for determining a 'fair return' under rent control? Can i use state mandated covid lockdowns as exemptions?

Per https://www.ci.richmond.ca.us/DocumentCenter/View/61839/MNOI...
Fair return defined Kenneth Barr method (MNOI) which the Courts have agreed with:
“as the price controls are not confiscatory; i.e, they do not deprive investors
of a fair return on their investment.”  fair return methodology used must be “concerned with the financial integrity of the business
as a whole, not the ability to obtain a return on a discrete portion of the business.”

MNOI presumes that the rents Landlords chose to charge, in a year free from
the idea of rent control, provided Landlords a fair return on their investment,
as the rents that were charged were based on general market conditions, and
not the upward pressure that policy discussions of rent control may have on
the market.

[Joseph Miguel]

Quote from @Becca F.:

Does this rent control apply to Oakland SFH or if it's a 2 unit or more?

Case law: https://cases.justia.com/california/court-of-appeal/2020-a15...

In Owens, the landlord owned and lived in a single-family home located in Oakland, California, and rented individual rooms in the home to three unrelated tenants. One of those tenants filed a petition pursuant to Oakland’s Rent Adjustment Program complaining about disruptive construction work and hazardous conditions at the premises. The tenant alleged that the landlord did not provide her notice about the Rent Adjustment Program and terminated her lease when she sought a reduction in rent due to the construction work. The landlord responded that the lease was not subject to the Rent Adjustment Program since the rental was for “sole use of one or more rooms and shared use of common areas (such as a kitchen) in the residence,” which was a single-family home.

In its decision, the court focused on the definition of a “dwelling unit” as used in the exception found in Civil Code section 1954.52(a)(3)(A), which provides that “an owner of residential real property may establish the initial and all subsequent rental rates for a dwelling or a unit about which the following is true…It is alienable separate from the title to any other dwelling unit….” . While the landlord defined the dwelling unit as his single-family home; the court, after analyzing the statutory definitions of the term, the determined that the dwelling unit at issue was the separate room being rented to the tenant.[2] As a result, the landlord had converted his single unit dwelling into a multi-unit dwelling that was subject to Oakland’s Rent Adjustment Program since the individual rooms were not alienable separate from the title to any other dwelling unit.

Under the court’s decision, tenants in Oakland renting rooms in a single-family home or a condominium are entitled to the protections provided by Oakland’s Rent Adjustment Program. By extension, other California tenants living in municipalities that have rent control laws are likely protected to the extent the landlord was relying on the same Costa-Hawkins exception as the landlord in Owens and operating under a similar leasing arrangement. It is important to note that the court here did not consider the landlord’s argument that the tenant was in actuality renting and sharing the entire home, and not just a room because the landlord raised this argument for the first time on appeal.

My advice now: never rent out anything in oakland. I've heard of house hacking cases where the tenants essentially evict an owner with false complaints to the rent board.