At the end of the year, the County of Los Angeles’ moratorium prohibiting evictions will be lifted, and with it, several other renter protections will be lifted. These include preventing evictions from no fault of the tenants, from tenants being a nuisance, or having unauthorized occupants or pets. These also include a freeze on rent increases on rent stabilized units and mobile homes in unincorporated areas.
At the Sept. 13 meeting of the LA County Board of Supervisors, the board committed 3-2 to ending the moratorium at the end of the year, with supervisors Sheila Kuehl and Hilda Solis voting against it. The board also committed to informing both tenants and landlords that this change was coming.
Supervisor Kuehl said she wants to see the protections extended.
“I want to bring a motion to continue the tenant protections,” Kuehl said. “Not the non-payment of rent, which we all agreed would have to be phased out because you can’t ask landlords to carry all the brunt of it, but to substitute for the freeze some cap, at least that’s what I will propose to this board, some cap of how much you can raise it every year, which many jurisdictions have. And that would just be in our unincorporated areas, as well as whether you can be kicked out for just any reason, or continue what we all voted for, which was eviction only for just cause. And just cause is serious enough that we need to get rid of you, not that we have two dogs instead of one or that your aunt moved in.”
The City of Los Angeles has a similar moratorium in place, and the Los Angeles Housing Department recommended that it remain in place until the end of the year.
Daniel Yukelson, executive director of the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles, or AAGLA, spoke in favor of lifting the moratorium.
“We’ve had price controls now in place in LA County and LA City for nearly three years,” Yukelson said. “And had rapidly rising inflation, gas prices are $5 to $6 a gallon. Labor shortages, supply shortages, and costs have been increasing all over.”
Yukelson said that insurance and property taxes have gone up because of the fires and litigation.
“Without being able to take on those price increases by increasing revenue, it’s really put owners in a bind,” Yukelson said.
Yukelson described the renter protections as extreme, and said that while they are scheduled to end at the end of the year, there have been several proposals to extend them, and said these could put property owners out of business.
“Rental property owners were the only service providers during COVID that were put under such restrictions,” Yukelson said. “No one else was required to abide by these price controls, where they couldn’t increase their income to deal with all the increase in cost. No other business had curbs put on it for pursuing collection of revenue. As a result, a lot of these property owners are going to be left holding the bag.”
Yukelson said that small, independent property owners will go out of business, and be replaced with corporations, who will turn buildings into condominiums or luxury rentals.
Lupita Gonzalez, the senior housing organizer for the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, or ACCE, said that she supports extending the moratorium because the city and county are still in a health crisis. She gave an example of a person contracting COVID-19 and not being able to go to work for a week.
“If you don’t have work, you don’t receive a paycheck to pay the rent, pay the bills,” Gonzalez said.
Gonzalez said she wants to see the renter protections extended, as there are a lot of families still in need.
“It’s not because they don’t want to pay the rent,” Gonzalez said. “They want to pay the rent but don’t have the money. We don’t ask the landlords to forgive the rent, we ask the landlords to wait a little bit, and then make [an] agreement to the tenants pay little by little.”
Gonzalez said that the next time LA City Council discusses the moratorium, her organization will go to city hall and testify as to why the protections should remain in place.
Eric Eisenberg, a member of the board of the San Pedro Historic Waterfront Business Improvement District, owns several residential properties, with a total of about 100 tenants. He said he absolutely supports the end of the eviction moratorium.
“We have tenants that rented during COVID, fully qualified, fully employed, and once they occupied the apartments stopped paying rent, because they knew of the eviction moratorium that nothing could be done,” Eisenberg said.
Eisenberg said these tenants had never paid a full month’s rent, and only paid what was required to move in.
“We also know landlords where they’ve had multiple tenants in very small buildings stop paying rent for no particular reason,” Eisenberg said. “I’m not even talking about people that are actually affected by COVD and unemployment due to COVID and illness during COVID. I’m talking the fraud and abuse, and this has been horrible.”
San Pedro resident Steve Casares spoke out in favor of the protections for renters.
“I am of the opinion that housing is a human right, not something to be done for profit,” Casares wrote on Facebook. “I would prefer that some of the protections stay in place because too many Rent Collectors have too much power and abuse the current system.”
Abuses in San Pedro
A San Pedro resident, who requested not to be named, is facing eviction, but does not know why. She said she is a good tenant. She says she is quiet, and has kept up on her rent. She doesn’t understand why her landlord wants to evict her.
Twice, her landlord has sent her brother-in-law to harass her. The first time, he body-slammed her, and the second time he hit her in the face. The landlord has also removed the resident’s washer, dryer, kitchen table and chairs, trash can and mailbox. The resident is renting a duplex, and her landlord tore down the wall between the two different sections of the house, eliminating the barrier between the resident and the landlord’s parents.
The resident said that earlier this year, her landlord filed a lawful detainer to evict her, but the woman won the case. The resident does intend to leave, but not until her landlord pays her relocation money.
Another San Pedro resident, named Loretta McNair, rents a fourplex, and has a vacancy because a tenant was evicted during the COVID-19 protections.
“It took almost one year to get her out,” McNair wrote via Facebook Messenger. “She was violent and assaulted two other tenants, she was schizophrenic and destroyed the property, and she had 3 dogs in her one bedroom apartment that she couldn’t take care of. Those renter protections were a case of the law protecting the criminal rather than the victims of her crimes. We were all scared to leave our apartments every day while she lived here.”
McNair said the woman was a squatter, and never paid rent. The landlord was eventually able to evict her through the court system, not because of the non-payment of rent, but because of the attacks.
“I’m happy that the government applied compassion to the situation we all faced for 2 years, but disgusted at the abuses that came from it,” McNair said. “So I don’t mind when [the renter protections] come to an end.”
Of the 116 homes sold in the South Bay Beach cities, 22 sellers(19%) had to lower home prices before getting an offer. Out of 329 home sellers in the Harbor area 59 home sellers (18%) lowered their asking price, the Palos Verdes home sellers 9 of 53 (17%), and the Inland area sellers, 17 of 153 (11%). Those were price reductions necessary to get an offer on the property, followed by a successful sale. Let’s look at properties active on the market, still trying to get an offer.
