Landlords Throw Party to Celebrate Being Able to Evict People Again
Landlords Throw Party to Celebrate Being Able to Evict People Again
The Berkeley Property Owners Association's fall mixer is called "Celebrating the End of the Eviction Moratorium."
The Berkeley Property Owners Association's fall mixer is called "Celebrating the End of the Eviction Moratorium."
A group of Berkeley, California landlords will hold a fun social mixer over cocktails to celebrate their newfound ability to kick people out of their homes for nonpayment of rent, as first reported by Berkeleyside.
The Berkeley Property Owner Association lists a fall mixer on its website on Tuesday, September 12, 530 PM PST. “We will celebrate the end of the Eviction Moratorium and talk about what's upcoming through the end of the year,” the invitation reads. The event advertises one free drink and “a lovely selection of appetizers,” and encourages attendees to “join us around the fire pits, under the heat lamps and stars, enjoying good food, drink, and friends.”
The venue will ironically be held at a space called “Freehouse”, according to its website. Attendees who want to join in can RSVP on their website for $20.
Berkeley’s eviction moratorium lasted from March 2020 to August 31, 2023, according to the city’s Rent Board, during which time tenants could not be legally removed from their homes for nonpayment of rent. Landlords could still evict tenants if they had “Good Cause” under city and state law, which includes health and safety violations. Landlords can still not collect back rent from March 2020 to April 2023 through an eviction lawsuit, according to the Rent Board.
Berkeleyside spoke to one landlord planning to attend the eviction moratorium party who was frustrated that they could not evict a tenant—except that they could evict the tenant, who was allegedly a danger to his roommates—but the landlord found the process of proving a health and safety violation too tedious and chose not to pursue it.
The Berkeley Property Owner Association is a landlord group that shares leadership with a lobbying group called the Berkeley Rental Housing Coalition which advocated against a law banning source of income discrimination against Section 8 tenants and other tenant protections.
The group insists on not being referred to as landlords, however, which they consider “slander.” According to the website, “We politely decline the label "landlord" with its pejorative connotations.” They also bravely denounce feudalism, an economic system which mostly ended 500 years ago, and say that the current system is quite fair to renters.
“Feudalism was an unfair system in which landlords owned and benefited, and tenant farmers worked and suffered. Our society is entirely different today, and the continued use of the legal term ‘landlord’ is slander against our members and all rental owners.” Instead, they prefer to be called “housing providers.”
While most cities’ eviction moratoria elapsed in 2021 and 2022, a handful of cities in California still barred evictions for non-payment into this year. Alameda County’s eviction moratorium expired in May, Oakland’s expired in July. San Francisco’s moratorium also elapsed at the end of August, but only covered tenants who lost income due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
In May, Berkeley’s City Council added $200,000 to the city’s Eviction Defense Funds, money which is paid directly to landlords to pay tenants’ rent arrears, but the city expected those funds to be tapped out by the end of June.
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What? You couldn't kick out tenants if they weren't paying rent before?? That's insane.
Obviously there should be grace periods etc and the whole system is fucked with house prices, but if you're providing a service and people don't pay for the service, you should be able to stop providing the service.
The service is warmth, shelter and safety. I just want to point that out since you really want to make it sound like it's the same as a Netflix subscription.
All true. But what’s also true is paying a mortgage with rental income. It’s why some folks found themselves out anyway as the house was sold. When a landlord is backed into a corner financially, this is their answer.
What is also an answer is rentals sitting vacant out of squatting fear. I found this often while travel nursing. Landlords who would rent to me for 3+ months, but only because I’m temporary and can show them I already have a home. When folks stop honoring the contract to pay for the shit they’re borrowing, less inventory is going to be a very real outcome.
Consider. Your monthly income is 4 rentals at $1500 each, minus expenses. Property tax. Income tax. Maintenance. Possibly a water/sewage bill. One stops paying. Then 2. Enter legal expenses. Your current mortgage where you’re living is still due. Managing it and providing your own childcare is your full time job.
There’s this whole ethos that there are no people involved on the landlord side and there can be no financial struggle from anyone with a landlord title.
That and there’s a very simple fact of it’s not your shit. You’re borrowing someone else’s things under contract.
I agree it’s not ideal, but systemic housing change comes from several steps above a landlord. She’s just someone with extra shit she can lend out for a fee. Punishing her in the meantime like she owes you something, after making property available for use so someone can have a home, not cool. She doesn’t owe you rent or a home.
Landlords existing increases the cost of housing for everyone, they’re parasites on society.
A house should only be held by a landlord or builder for as long as it takes to sell it, with heavy taxes for sitting on properties. That would provide housing.
Then no one would build houses because if the house doesn't sell in time all the benefit to building a house gets taxed away.
There is profit in building and selling houses, why do you think that would change if regulations to remove landlords rent seeking behaviour were implemented?
if the house doesn’t sell in time all the benefit to building a house gets taxed away.
How little profit do you think there is in building houses? Actually this is a waste of time discussing with you.
Landlords are not an intrinsically necessary part of the housing landscape. Whether they are good or bad is secondary to the fact that they aren’t needed. For every supposed ‘service’ landlords provide, there is an alternative way to get that thing done.
Consider. Your monthly income is 4 rentals at $1500 each, minus expenses. Property tax. Income tax. Maintenance. Possibly a water/sewage bill. One stops paying. Then 2. Enter legal expenses. Your current mortgage where you’re living is still due. Managing it and providing your own childcare is your full time job.
There’s this whole ethos that there are no people involved on the landlord side and there can be no financial struggle from anyone with a landlord title.
You're ignoring the main point. If people stop paying, it's usually because they lost their job and are looking for a new one. So why don't you suggest the landlord get a part time job to make up their income? Why should they be entitled to rent during a pandemic when their tenant lost their job?
Also, you are ignoring the fact that there were Covid funds available for landlords who lost rent due to non-payment. It was an inconvenience, but so was Covid. As a nurse did you throw a fit because you had to wear extra protective equipment? Or did you realize the reason behind it?
The eviction moratorium was ultimately a health policy. Maybe you didn't realize that, but its purpose was to save lives.
I don’t know all the details, and I generally agree with you, but August 2023 seems a little late doesn’t it?
They were being conservative.
Maybe a little too much. Unemployment hit pre-Covid levels mid way through last year. I think it’s fair to say it served its purpose and maybe went on a little too long.
How to then pay child care to work that part time gig. Odds are good the cost of childcare would exceed part time unskilled labor income.
There’s a lot of assumption here re entitlement. Ideally everyone should have housing. Ideally, everyone who engages a contract to loan out use of their stuff for money should either get the money or get their stuff back. If there’s no rent to be had, great, give that persons belongings back.
My point is there’s impact on both. Being dismissive of either party who can no longer pay bills is what misses the point.
The landlord IS entitled to rent while you’re in their property. That’s the contract.
If you want to call housing a right, which is an ideal I would love to see realized in a practical, actionable way, then the onus should not be on the back of any single private citizen making loan of their property, but in those who collect 22-32% of our incomes already.
That piece, the responsibility of providing housing to citizens, regardless of capacity to pay rent for a loan, would go higher up the chain.
Punishing a private citizen for engaging a rental contract on the landlord side, out of spite, because housing should be a right but isn’t is not the way to solve the problem but only works to not only create bigger problems (including higher rent…a spite response to that spite) but is just another version of private citizens fighting one another instead of fighting up.
The responses absolutely blow my mind here. I’ve been fucked over by landlords before but it’s completely illogical to expect someone to just let you live in their apts rent free.
No one is saying people should be able to simply not pay bills. They want the bills to not exist. People deserve mortgages of their own.
Yes but there is no way an 18 year old who just left school and is working minimum wage can afford a mortgage, completely ignoring the fact that they haven't had time to even save a deposit. Being able to rent and pay less than mortgage prices gives people a chance to save up for their own house.
"Less than mortgage"? Those days are over!
Maybe where you live but not here.
Not everyone wants to own. There are legitimate reasons for landlords to exist. They shouldn’t be as prevalent as they are, but buying isn’t always the best option for everyone.
There are times in my life where I didn’t want to own. For some reason everyone here thinks everyone wants to own.
If they want afford rent. They can’t afford a home to own.
This year alone if spent 50k on mine outside of the mortgage.
There seems to be some weird magical thinking that homes would be half the cost of there were no landlords. That isn’t true at all.
No one is under that illusion, you idiot. Things break in a rental, too, but at least when you own it, you donpt have to wait three weeks for the land lord to get off their ass and call the one lazy SoB they have a contract with that'll be out in one to three more weeks...
Idiot. Most people here are claiming exactly that.
I’ve never had to wait more than a few hours to get someone to look at something when I was renting.
It got pretty bad for a while. Landlords were stuck with properties that had tenants that were getting absolutely destroyed and there was nothing they could legally do about it. It resulted in increased barriers they put up to ensure that folks would actually pay rent and not destroy properties. It's become increasingly difficult to actually get an apartment in many cities with this rule in place.
No sympathy, landlords should get real jobs
Clearly they're more "real" than the jobs that disappeared during COVID.
So is organized crime, what's your point?
My point is that landlord is more of a "real" job, if we're measuring by how essential to society they are, than the BS make-work jobs that most people do.
In other words, jobs that were lost during COVID are less essential (read: "real") than jobs that were mandated to continue without interruption.
My point is that landlord is more of a "real" job, if we're measuring by how essential to society they are
Landlords are essential to society in the same way that fleas are essential to dogs. Whether or not a job is a real job is based on how much value it provides to people. As in not the top 1%, there are too few of them for their wants to be relevant and they're no longer actually people anyway.
If the dog declared the fleas essential and forbade them from leaving, then your analogy would hold.
People owning things is not necessary for society.
Is that honestly what you think I'm saying?
Then what you want is less rental inventory. Because this is how you get less rental inventory.
What, you gonna tear down the apartment buildings? You know you can just sell people the deeds to their apartments. That's already in practice, in places with a shitload less homeless people.
You know you can just sell people the deeds to their apartments.
Considering that Apartments are not deeded per unit. No you can't. You'd have to convert the apartment to condominiums... Setup an HOA (which everyone hates right?) then get everyone to pay into it... etc... You're not getting away with not paying.
Was that supposed to be a gotcha? Maybe your landlord should have replaced the lead paint in your childhood home.
Yes, that would literally be a gotcha. It's legally not possible to do what you want to do. That's a hell of a gotcha.
What I'm describing already exists, making every other consideration moot. If something exists, it stops being impossible. Do you see how that works?
Apartments are not deeded by unit. So no. It cannot simply be done.
So you see how that works?
I am sincerely sorry that you don't care about people's quality of life and ensuring everyone gets quality housing over your ideology.
ensuring everyone gets quality housing over your ideology.
And yet here you are celebrating poor people getting kicked out of their homes.
Less people got housing overall because grifters, not poor people were taking advantage. These largely were people that could otherwise afford it. It led to increased economic and societal barriers to starting new leases.
This policy didn't dismantle capitalism; it made the existing system more exclusive.
You're acting like rent grifting is some widespread problem. A vast majority of tenants aren't destroying where they live and taking advantage of their landlords. In reality eviction moratorium was put in place so landlords couldn't hike the cost of rent during the pandemic and that's how most tenants are using it. We're in a rolling recession and a lot of people are going to lose their homes because of this.
Literally none of the rest is true and I challenge you to prove it. We are not in a recession. Rent grifting as a perceived problem causing the above effects regardless of being able to put any numbers towards it one way or another.
I lost my home of over 7 years at the end of last year because the landlord decided to increase the cost by $900 a month even though I managed to pay them for every month of the pandemic via housing assistance etc, so you can fuck right off with saying none of it is true.
So your anecdote of your personal event is indicative of the entire market?
I'm sorry you had a bad time... but let's look at what you said.
You're implication here is that you've rented for 7 years, and apparently NEVER had a rent increase? That's insane on it's own. Now 7 years later you're complaining that there's finally a rent increase? Even though costs of maintaining a house has gone up over time... Those costs your landlord would have been eating for 7 years. Further, you never state what you were actually paying... If you were renting a $5000 house, and then it went up to $5900, that's actually expected as rent tends to increase at about 2.5%.
Now if it started at $750 and now it's increasing to $1650 with no changes to the property, then you might have a leg to stand on to complain... but please keep the emotions out of it. I used to rent at a condominium complex... Where each unit is owned. TONS of units would get trashed every year because the vast majority of renters do not know how to maintain a house... and don't want to learn/be liable for it. Those units were NEVER maintained properly, because they simply were not educated on how to perform that maintenance, and I'm talking simple things like cleaning up after a liquid spill on carpet.
Please point out in my reply where I said I never got a rent increase during that time. I'll wait.
Also, I don't need you or any other asshole on here telling me what a reasonable rent increase is for my area, for the property I inhabited for 7 years. I already know, and a $900 increase all at once, even for this area, was absurd for where I was renting. It was such a ridiculous increase that I couldn't justify it and had to move against my wishes, after being a model renter by most standards. I don't need to tell you more than that.
That has literally nothing to do with what the above poster claimed so you can cool your jets and consider that your landlord was only able to do that because they have a scarce resource, made more scarce by the above policies. I will not fuck right off while you folks make the situation literally worse. You can fuck off and let educated folks solve problems with real economic policies.
I made the situation worse? How exactly? I paid in full for every month I was there, my landlord didn't lose anything on me as a renter, and it didn't matter, still got priced out by an obscene raise in rent only done because we have zero rent control and there was nothing to stop her from getting away with it.
No, asshole, you can fuck off with your ignorance, I understood what Mooselad said perfectly well.
Literally posted today
Literally none of that is true? So you're saying a vast majority of tenants are destroying homes? That's delusional lol
And there's another one. A rolling recession is not the same thing as a recession.
Not really their home if they’re not paying for it.
My house is my home because I pay for it.
They’re celebrating people who destroy their homes getting kicked out making it easier for other people (who likely need it just as much) to get in instead
Yes because most landlords are regularly getting their homes destroyed and only kick out people who destroy their homes. They would never kick people out to hike rent prices. And it's not like 9% of homes in America are just sitting vacant, right?
And it’s not like 9% of homes in America are just sitting vacant, right?
This alone means nothing...
2010 it was 11.4%, and in 2020 it's now 9.7%. So either more houses that were vacant are no longer vacant... or the market has added more houses to the market overall that are not vacant to effectively scale the 11.4 down to 9.7%.
But there's a whole lot of caveats on how those numbers are generated as well...
Housing units are classified as vacant if no one was living in them on Census Day (April 1) — unless the occupants are absent only temporarily, such as away on vacation, in the hospital for a short stay, or on a business trip.
They are also classified as vacant if they are temporarily occupied entirely by individuals who have a usual residence elsewhere at the time of enumeration such as beach houses rented to vacationers who have a usual residence elsewhere.So any "shared" housing such as timeshares... or second homes are all considered "vacant" even if they aren't and have people live in them for particular times of the year.
Now you can make the claim that people with multiple houses are monsters... fine, but that's a completely different thing than "9% of all houses are vacant". I would also wonder how many houses are "vacant" because they're literally unlivable. If you check the link the highest rates were states like Maine/Vermont/Alaska where no heat is literally a death sentence... but otherwise those houses would be unrentable.
I agree with him and also care that people get quality housing
Which would be easily possible if all the shitty landlords (including corps) weren't allowed to just hold onto properties like they currently can
We could easily house every homeless person in the US, but we dont
We could also build more housing but you'd rather focus on targeting those that already have it making it more scarce.
You should be, because that's a stupid-ass opinion and something went very wrong in your life (blow to the head as a baby?) that you could ever say it.
Your comment literally was just an insult and provided no argument. Why bother? It doesn't make you look mature.
It says in the article they could evict for health and safety concerns if they were willing to do some paperwork. Property damage is a crime. Nothing they could legally do about it my ass.