Despite legal challenges from landlords, the COVID-era eviction protections Alameda County tenants have enjoyed since the start of the pandemic aren’t going anywhere — at least for now.
A federal judge rejected an attempt by property owners to immediately end the ordinances that, more than two and a half years after the pandemic started, continue to severely limit the ways in which a landlord can evict a tenant. That means the ordinances will remain in place while an underlying court case continues toward a potential settlement or trial.
Alameda County is one of just two Bay Area counties that still has COVID eviction protections in place. Tenant’s rights advocates argue the continued eviction protections are needed to keep renters — many of whom haven’t recovered financially from the economic devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic — from becoming homeless. On the other side, landlord groups argue that the protections have outlived their usefulness and are hurting mom-and-pop landlords who need the rent to pay their mortgages.
Landlords sued Alameda County and the city of Oakland over the eviction bans earlier this year. They then asked Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler to issue summary judgement on their behalf, which would have forced an immediate end to the eviction bans. On Tuesday, Beeler rejected their attempts.
“We are disappointed, but not deterred, by Judge Beeler’s ruling,” Whitney Prout, legal and compliance counsel for the California Apartment Association, said in an emailed statement. “Substantial legal questions on the validity of the eviction moratorium and its impacts on housing providers remain to be litigated. Alameda County rental housing providers deserve to have their rights represented in court and CAA is committed to ensuring that is done in this case.”
The California Apartment Association is a plaintiff in the case.
Oakland City Attorney Barbara Parker and the Alameda County County Counsel office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Alameda County ordinances were part of a spate of laws that went into effect across the Bay Area and the state in the wake of the pandemic. In Oakland, landlords can’t evict a tenant for failing to pay rent unless the tenant poses an immediate threat to the health or safety of other renters. Alameda County’s protections are similar, but provide an exception for landlords who want to evict a tenant who isn’t paying rent and take their unit off the rental market.
Though similar statewide COVID eviction protections have since expired, as have measures in most of the rest of the five-county Bay Area, Oakland and Alameda have kept theirs in place. Both will expire after the city and county end their state of emergency — which neither has made a move to do yet.
San Francisco also renewed its eviction protections earlier this year.
Plaintiffs in the Oakland and Alameda County case argued the eviction bans unconstitutionally deprive landlords of their property in violation of the Fifth Amendment.
But the judge disagreed. The ordinances are temporary, do not relieve tenants of their obligation to pay rent and include exceptions, she wrote. The plaintiffs also failed to prove that the eviction bans “were an unreasonable response to a legitimate public problem.” And the bans don’t violate state law, which allows local jurisdictions to draft their own eviction restrictions, Beeler wrote.
Evictions have skyrocketed in the Bay Area as COVID renter protections have expired, a recent Bay Area News Group analysis found. The five-county region saw more than 6,300 eviction filings between July 2021 and June 2022, a spike that started when many eviction bans started to expire in September 2021. Rates were lower in Alameda County, where the bans remain in place.
Staff writer Ethan Varian contributed to this report.
Source: www.mercurynews.com