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THREAD: Courts in California are resuming eviction cases, but there’s also been a battery of new rules that aim to keep tenants economically affected by COVID-19 in their homes. I want to emphasize some points from today's explainer and add context https://www.latimes.com/homeless-housing/story/2020-09-03/california-eviction-court-protections-housing (1/7)
There’s a bunch of overlapping federal, state and local rules and it's not clear how they interact. You could argue that individual provisions from each program could be more tenant friendly, but overall the state law is more generous to tenants than the federal order (2/7)
The governor and the California Apartment Assn contend that the federal order doesn’t apply here at all because of that. But again that’s not 100% clear because some of the tenant notification requirements are less onerous under the federal standard. https://caanet.org/gov-newsom-cdc-eviction-ban-does-not-apply-in-california/ (3/7)
For their part, the city of LA put out an FAQ today saying that their rules are, in fact, the strongest. That’s also debatable. Here’s a link to the city attorney’s statement https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/96/c5/7c47ec144d72b22f9f2de0e9373f/la-city-attorney-facts-about-tenant-protections-during-the-pandemic-9-3-20.pdf (4/7)
So despite some real rules against eviction they're also extremely confusing. In eviction court, 90% of tenants don't have lawyers. It's hard for those affected to take advantage of their rights. People WILL slip through the cracks and get evicted https://cdn.americanprogress.org/content/uploads/2019/10/01114529/Right-To-Counsel.pdf (5/7)
And it should not be overlooked that smaller landlords in particular are also at risk of being unable to pay their bills. Under the state rules, for instance, they could have 11 months of no rental income before they’re allowed to evict a tenant who hasn’t paid. (6/7)
At bottom, people have rent and bills that have to be paid now or soon. And especially with the expiration of many federal benefits, there’s less money available to do so. Whatever eviction/foreclosure cliff exists none of what’s been done recently ultimately avoids that (7/7)
