Fact Check: Evictions — Mercury News
On 2/12/23 The Mercury News had a story on evictions which had several misleading concepts. I will discuss them here and the full Merc article is attached below.
Merc claims: Bay Area “evictions are soaring.” There is “a surge of more than 10,000 eviction lawsuits filed across 5 Bay Area Counties.”
Fact check: False and Misleading
The Merc is conflating two things which are not the same. A filing is not a removal nor a displacement of a tenant. In fact, the filing is only the first legalistic step a housing provider takes in an effort to get back money owed them by a non paying tenant. The majority of eviction filings in Santa Clara County do not end up with the renter leaving the property, rather most end up with a negotiated settlement which results in partial or full payment of unpaid rent to the landlord. Well less than 1% of all rentals end up with an actual eviction. The Merc, however, headlines an infographic regarding eviction *filings* increases as “Evictions Soar.” This is palpably false. Eviction filings of course increased this year, as there has been a three-year backlog regarding filings because of the pandemic-era eviction moratorium. Housing providers have been waiting for payment for jobs they have done; that even now, that payment often times never came from: the feds, the state, the county, the renter, nor the city of San Jose.
Merc claims: “High quality attorneys mean renters would have won their eviction case.” “Only some (counties) currently have access to rental aid and legal representation, leaving many to navigate the often intimidating eviction process on their own.”
Fact check: Misleading
In Santa Clara County, the nonprofit Law Foundation is alerted when eviction cases have been filed. And the Law Foundation often represents renters — at no charge. Housing providers receive no such support from the government-funded non profits, and have to pay substantial legal fees in an effort to collect unpaid rents. The Merc offers zero evidence to suggest that legal help superior to the Law Foundation’s fine legal team would result in a different outcome. The truth is, even Clarence Darrow would not be able to remove debt that was created as a result of services provided through a valid rental contract.
Final comment from BAHN-SJ: San Jose could create its own rental voucher system to help folks who need temporary-to-long-term assistance until they can get a federal Section 8 voucher. Unfortunately, the only time a renter in need can get San Jose rental assistance is when and if the housing provider actually files for an eviction. This is backward thinking. We should be able to proactively get in front of this problem and help renters through difficult times before they become unable to pay their housing provider.
Mercury News Article -
By ETHAN VARIAN | evarian@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group
PUBLISHED: February 12, 2023 at 6:15 a.m. | UPDATED: February 23, 2023 at 10:00 a.m.
Janae Randolph waited nervously with her boyfriend outside a wood-paneled courtroom at the Contra Costa County courthouse in Martinez. She scanned the increasingly crowded hallway for somebody official-looking — maybe a public defender, she hoped — who would explain why they’d been summoned after receiving an eviction notice at their Concord apartment.
The bailiff motioned Randolph toward the defendant’s chair. Then suddenly, their names were called and a trial started. The couple found themselves seated alone, across from their landlord’s attorney at a separate table. Before them, a black-robed commissioner perched on the judge’s bench began asking pointed questions about their missed rent payments.
She answered carefully the questions from the commissioner, who oversees eviction cases, even though she didn’t fully understand what was happening. “You don’t want to make her upset, or say the wrong thing,” Randolph said. “So I felt like I just had to go with it, against my own judgment.”
Randolph’s case is one in a surge of more than 10,000 eviction lawsuits filed across the core five-county Bay Area since the fall of 2021, when state and local pandemic eviction protections started to wind down, according to a Bay Area News Group analysis of court data.
While court data affirms advocates’ warnings of an “eviction tsunami” in areas where protections lapsed, it also reflects the disparities in resources available to the growing numbers of tenants facing eviction across the Bay Area. Only some currently have access to rental aid and legal representation, leaving many to navigate the often intimidating eviction process on their own.
Contra Costa County “does not have the same level of protections or tenant resources” as other parts of the region, said Alex Werth, policy and research director with the nonprofit East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy. “The results of this disparity are really borne out in the data.”
Over the second half of 2022 — after most emergency protections had fully expired — eviction filings soared 43% above pre-pandemic levels in Contra Costa, Santa Clara and San Mateo counties combined, according to court data. Despite the distribution of a half-billion aid dollars to struggling renters across those counties during the pandemic, advocates expect eviction cases to remain high in the months ahead.
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, where a narrow eviction protection ordinance has been in effect since July, cases rose to pre-COVID-19 numbers.
The exception was Alameda County, where broad eviction safeguards dating back to March 2020 are keeping cases at historic lows. Multiple landlord groups have sued to end emergency renter protections in the county, arguing they are no longer needed since the worst of the pandemic is over and most people have returned to work. Officials have said an eviction protection ordinance covering the entire county could expire April 30, but restrictions on evictions in individual cities, including Oakland, may extend beyond that date.
Last year, Contra Costa County had the highest eviction case rate in the core Bay Area, with one filing for every 116 households, according to court data. Next came San Francisco, with one for every 171 households; Santa Clara, with one for every 195 households; San Mateo, with one for every 210 households; and Alameda, with just one for every 616 households.
Between May and October, advocates with the East Bay Alliance attended and tracked 56 eviction proceedings in Contra Costa County Superior Court. They found that 86% of landlords came to court with an attorney, while only 7% of tenants had legal representation. As a result, renters lost cases they might otherwise have won had they had access to “high-quality and timely legal services,” according to a report summarizing the findings.
To shift the power imbalance between landlords and tenants, the report recommends creating a program to offer all renters facing eviction a lawyer, similar to an effort San Francisco started in 2019. Unlike in criminal cases, defendants in eviction suits have no right to counsel.
A city report on San Francisco’s program — one of the few anywhere in the country — found that during the first half of 2019, over two-thirds of households with an attorney were able to stay in their homes, compared to just 38% of households without representation.
Even though Santa Clara County doesn’t have its own eviction defense program, Todd Rothbard, a landlord attorney, said he’s seen few renters there actually forced out of their units in recent months, even as eviction cases have spiked. That’s because local government agencies and nonprofits have been stepping in to cover tenants’ unpaid rent at eviction proceedings, he said.
“Landlords don’t wake up in the morning saying, ‘Gee, who can I evict?’” Rothbard said. “They’re generally thrilled if someone can step up and pay rent.”
But that same level of aid doesn’t appear available in many other parts of the region.
Most counties across the state offer a mediation program for landlords and tenants, however. The goal of mediation is generally to help the two sides agree to a repayment plan or move-out date and then prevent an eviction case from showing up on a tenant’s record and ruining their chances of renting another home.
For some renters, however, just getting an appointment with a court-appointed mediator can be a nerve-racking process.
Randolph wasn’t able to sign up for mediation in January because her landlord didn’t go to court that day. The commissioner agreed to set a new date, but Randolph still hasn’t received notification from the court and isn’t sure whether a hearing has been scheduled. She said lawyers representing the landlord haven’t returned her desperate calls to hash out a deal.
Randolph’s property manager did not respond to requests to discuss the case, and attempts to reach the owner were unsuccessful.
“My problem is that I don’t have an attorney,” she said. “But everywhere I call, they want money, and I can’t provide any money when I’m in the situation I’m in.”
After the pandemic hit, emergency assistance covered the couple’s rent while they were laid off. But once that program ended, Randolph, 27, who worked at a cannabis store, and her boyfriend, Douglas Pineda Jr., 35, an electrician, racked up around $11,000 in unpaid rent during the months she couldn’t return to work after undergoing surgery.
Randolph hopes that her landlord will agree to hide the eviction so the couple and her brother’s family can move into a house together in Pittsburg, where rents are less expensive. With a new job in the mailroom of a worker’s compensation company, she thinks she could help pay off the rent debt, and the couple could slowly get back on their feet.
But without a clear understanding of where they stand in the eviction process, that plan remains in limbo.
“It’s just the two of us and our two little cats,” Randolph said. “It would be hard to be on the streets.”
