Eviction moratorium's gone, but most CA landlords can't afford to evict

 
 

Local mom-and-pop housing providers are now caught in a double bind between ignoring nonpaying tenants (or paying them to move out) and actually evicting them (which can rack up tens of thousands in legal fees). Below, California Insider surveys the issue: how landlords are hurt by unpaid back rent, how they're creatively attempting to make things work, and why rental relief hasn't even dented the problem.

Many California landlords have been hit hard by statewide eviction moratoriums that allowed tenants hit by financial hardship because of the COVID-19 pandemic not to pay rent for as long as three years. However, now that the moratoriums have been lifted across the state, evictions for some landlords are costing tens of thousands, forcing some to sell their property, and leave the rental industry in California.

There’s about $1 billion in unpaid back rent for Alameda County alone, according to estimates by a landlord in that county who led efforts to end the eviction moratorium there—which lasted from March 2020 until the summer of 2023.

The county had a monthly average of 310 evictions in 2019, which dropped to about 55 during the pandemic and rose to about 580 when the moratorium was lifted in the county in October 2023, according to records provided by the Alameda County Superior Court.

As a member of the East Bay Rental Housing Association—which represents about 1,600 rental property owners in Alameda and Contra Costa counties, Chris Moore, who has 20 rental properties of his own, told The Epoch Times that legal costs to evict unpaying tenants can be more than some landlords can afford.

He said the landlord is usually right but that the costs can still be too high to go through with an eviction.

“I can disprove all of them,” he said, referring to renters fighting to not have to pay. “But I have to ... pay a lawyer $500 to $600 an hour. It costs $30,000 to $40,000 now to do an eviction, so I can tell you, I’m not interested in evicting the tenant.” …

Some rental relief was offered in [Oakland] but prioritized tenants who earn less than $30,000. With $28 million in rental relief for tenants—to be collected by landlords—from the federal government and another $10.4 million from the state, Oakland quickly dispersed it as demand outstripped the funding, leaving many landlords on the hook for unpaid rent.

With the funds going quickly, cooperation from tenants was key for landlords to receive the assistance, but why should they care, Ms. Silas-Sams said, if there were no consequences?

“Even the program that they could have signed up for—that may have paid me something—they were too trifling to even do that. Because they didn’t have to, they didn’t have to do anything,” she said.

Many real estate professionals throughout the Bay Area are saying the same thing: The moratoriums were a blow that not all were prepared for.

When rents weren’t paid, landlords couldn’t pay their own bills, not just for weeks or months, but for years, said Jonathan Fleming, a lifelong Oakland resident who owns a real estate services company for residential and commercial properties.

“It’s one thing to tell the landlord, hey, you know, survive for six months, three months. But mostly these people had to survive for three-plus years,” he said in a recent interview with EpochTV’s “California Insider.”

This article originally appeared in California Insider. Read the whole thing here.

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