Why Eviction Moratoriums Are Bad for Tenants

I am pro-tenant. I voted for most, if not all, of the tenant protections enacted in California, Alameda County, and Oakland in the last 12 years of living there. But, when the eviction moratorium didn’t end after 1, then 2, and now 3 full years, I was shocked to learn that the excessive legislation in Oakland is literally causing the problems it’s trying to solve (homelessness, more corporate landlords, fewer units available, higher rents, and only the most qualified applicants getting rentals). If you really want to help tenants in places with excellent rent control, education, not legislation is the only way forward. Don’t believe me? Read on.

There’s no doubt in my mind that rent control is a good thing, in general. If you already live somewhere and have proven yourself to be a good tenant, by paying rent on time, not damaging the property or even fixing things yourself, communicating with the landlord when things go wrong, following the rules, etc., there is no reason, other than monetary or extenuating (like, the owner wants to move back into the home they are renting to you), to force someone out. The tenant already lives there and has proven to be trustworthy. From the landlord perspective, it’s expensive to “turn over a property,” that is, the cost involved in getting a property ready for a new tenant: cleaning, repainting, remodeling, and showing the property while having no rental income for the month or more that the property is vacant. Your next tenants may not be as good as the current ones. Conventional wisdom as a landlord, especially as a small landlord who owns fewer than 5ish rentals, is to keep tenants as long as you can. Do everything you can, in fact, to keep them happy. Offer to remodel the kitchen, say, in exchange for a 2 year lease.

So why do people raise rents or push people out when there is a good tenant? Reasons are sometimes practical, like a landlord wanting to move back into a property. Sometimes, market rent is much, much higher than the current tenant is paying. This often happens when a property is sold and the new landlord needs to charge market rent to pay the new, higher monthly mortgage payment. In my opinion, wanting more money is not a great reason to push someone out. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. If you are buying a property with an existing tenant, you better find out how much they are paying and make arrangements to NOT remove them. Period. That’s the landlord’s ethical duty, in my opinion.

So, now that we agree that we should have rules around when you can evict a good tenant and how much a landlord can increase rent, let’s talk about reasons to evict someone that are ok.

Eviction has become a dirty word. If we eliminate good tenants who can’t be evicted for money, we are left with evictions based on fault. Outside of shady landlords and a lack of tenant-friendly laws, eviction doesn’t just “happen” to people, tenants do things that lead to eviction. What are “acceptable” reasons to evict someone for fault? Non-payment of rent (if rent is reasonable, there’s no reason why this can’t be a reason to evict after, say, 2 months of trying to work with the tenant), damaging property, bringing in unauthorized pets or people, violating the lease, and disturbing other tenants and neighbors.

When a tenant doesn’t hold up their end of the bargain, eviction is part of the agreement. When a tenant doesn’t pay, a landlord can’t pay their mortgage (especially small landlords). When a tenant destroys property, the landlord has to pay to fix it. When a lease is violated or a tenant harasses others, the landlord is on the hook to make everyone happy. It’s shitty, but it’s part of being a landlord. Further, eviction is very expensive. Even more so in places with heavy rent control. For example, if a tenant refuses to leave in Alameda County, California, it could take up to 1 full year to get someone out with an unlawful detainer. In my opinion this is too long, but that is 1 year of probably no rent payments, likely destruction of property, not to mention the legal fees. It can cost upwards of $10,000 for that year in legal fees alone, not including the lost rent and maintenance.

So, now that you know eviction is expensive for landlords, not just in income lost, but in fixing destroyed property or making up for lost income for non-payment of rent, let’s talk about eviction moratoriums.

Eviction moratoriums came in 2020. They were introduced to keep people housed during an extraordinary emergency, the shelter-in-place order due to COVID-19. It made sense at the time, but should have been handled better. If the government wanted to help renters, they could and should have flooded Section 8 with cash or handed struggling renters the money to pay their rent directly (and, if they didn’t, they could be evicted for not paying) and left the courts open so people who were, say, damaging property, could have been removed. But that’s not what happened.

Instead, in Alameda County, in particular, they enacted an eviction moratorium that meant that there was NO REASON to evict someone. None.

Not for non-payment of rent.
Not for destruction of property.
Not for bringing in unauthorized pets.
Not for bringing in unauthorized people.
Not for harassing other tenants or neighbors.
Not to move into your own home that you own that you want to live in.
Not when the city fines the landlord for the tenant violating city codes in the property.
Not even when the neighbor sues the landlord for not removing their tenant who is harassing them (even though the landlord cannot).

These details are not well known. Articles talking about the eviction moratorium make it sound like it’s for non-payment of rent only. But it isn’t. It’s for way, way more.

Maybe some of this made sense in the first 6 months of the pandemic. But it most definitely doesn’t make sense 3 years later.

I live in Alameda County. As of this writing, it is one of only 2 remaining places in the entire United States with an eviction moratorium. And, the only one that has no end date.

Further, the funds set aside for landlords only cover 12 months of rent. Not 34 months of rent, which is how long the moratorium has been in place as of this writing. Also, the landlord and the tenant both are required to sign off to get the money. So, if a tenant doesn’t sign off, guess what? You don’t get any money. If the tenant makes too much money and doesn’t pay, you get no money and the tenant still doesn’t have to pay.

As you can imagine, if you were in the process of, say, evicting a squatter who was slated to be removed in March of 2020, you might be pretty upset that they get to continue living in your home for 3 more years rent-free. (source).

You might be upset if you, say, had, say, a serious repair to make to make the home more habitable and your tenants won’t let you make the repairs and you can’t evict for them, and your tenants try to sue you for not making repairs (not joking, I know someone in this situation).

You might be upset if your tenant who makes $150,000/year doesn’t pay their rent for 3 years and instead buys a new car and goes on vacation. (source).

Maybe you are still convinced that landlords are greedy bastards and get what’s coming to them. But, let’s consider for a moment, that at least 64% of landlords are actually NOT large corporations, but are small “mom-and-pop” landlords who have no more than 10 properties (and I’d wager that 80% of them have fewer than 5). These small landlords are much more likely to be retirees, people of color, single parents, and women.

Small landlords are usually the people you want to be landlords: they keep rents low, they have personal relationships with their tenants, and tend to work with them when there are issues. I bet the best landlord you ever had was one of these. Of course, there are still assholes, but let’s talk about the ones that aren’t.

Let’s say you own one house that you live in and one condo. You lived in the condo for 20 years until you could make enough money to buy a bigger place. Maybe you scrimped and saved so you could keep both homes and rent the other one out for a little extra cash. You are using that for your retirement income. If your one tenant stops paying, now you have nothing. Sure, you could make the argument that this is a risk of being a landlord and they should have diversified. Sure. But, in normal times, you’d be able to evict for non-payment of rent. Now, you have to keep paying the mortgage, maybe even paying the bills, and paying for maintenance. Let’s say the tenant refuses to sign the paper for the landlord assistance. Now, you are forced to make a choice: try to pay the bills on the condo with no income for 3 years, try to sell, or, maybe, try to do the one thing you can do: Ellis Act evict the tenant (where you remove the property from the rental market for 10 years).

If you can’t pay the bills, you will have to sell. Since you can’t pay the bills, you can’t afford an Ellis Act, which costs upwards of $20k in legal fees and takes up to 1 full year or more. After that, your home is unable to be rented out for 10 years (and it’s a $1 million lawsuit if it’s violated, so not ideal). So now, you have to pay for the home with no tenants for 10 years.

So you have to sell. The tenant comes with the house. The buyer won’t be able to remove the tenant either because of the eviction moratorium. So, who wants to buy a house with a tenant in it who isn’t paying that can never be removed? Who can afford to do this? A corporate landlord. That’s right. Now, those corporate landlords who don’t give a F*** what your rights are and can take the hit if you sue them, will have more properties and will treat tenants like numbers, not humans.

There are people like me who have a non-paying tenant in the home I live in. With my 2 children. I rented a room at below market rate to help pay the exorbitant mortgage that comes with a home purchase in California. Now that I haven’t been paid anything in 3 years, if I’m still even able to afford my mortgage, do you think I’ll do this again? Hell no. There’s another unit off the market.

And the last option, the Ellis Act? It literally removes the home from the rental market for a decade.

Tell me, how is removing properties from the market permanently (or for a decade) or forcing the small landlords who provide affordable housing to sell to corporate landlords, helpful to tenants? It isn’t.

Alameda county did a survey to see how many properties had non-payment of rent. The number was greater than 2,000 tenants. That didn’t even include the people who had tenants who could actually afford to pay and don’t. It only included “low income” people. So, if, say, that number is even 1,000 units, that’s 3,000 units being occupied by people who aren’t paying. Further, landlords can’t repair units in disrepair, because you can’t evict for a period of time (at the landlord’s great expense, I might add) to fix up the property. So you are causing tenants to have shitty places, too.

The people I know that are small landlords are planning to never again rent out their homes or are having to sell to corporate landlords. So, if we assume, conservatively, that half of the impacted landlords are taking their properties off the rental market, we are left with 1,500 units being permanently removed from the rental market.

What happens where there is less housing available? It’s simple supply and demand. The remaining housing gets more expensive. And, if you are a small landlord, I bet you will be VERY careful who you rent to in the future, if you do at all. So now, only people with the best credit and best income can get the properties that are available. And, you’ve just made fewer units available, created higher rents, and made it harder for any vulnerable person to rent again.

So, why is this eviction moratorium still going? And why are landlords supposed to foot the bill? If we truly believe housing should be free and a human right, that means that the government pays. Not landlords. Not people who own homes. The government. But since the government hasn’t done their job, they have passed the responsibility to house people to people like me: single moms who are just trying to pay their bills to live and stay in their community. Until the government actually makes a plan to do this effectively, they are actually making the housing crisis worse by removing units from the market, making the rents higher as a result, and making it so that only the richest and most privileged can even find a rental. Is this what we really want?

Asshole landlords will always exist. But once basic rent control is in place, the best way to help tenants is to educate them. In Oakland and Alameda County, it is extremely difficult and expensive to evict someone in normal times. Voting for more protections means that you will see more units go off the market.

So what is the remedy? End the moratorium and create a plan for people who actually need help. And, for God’s sake, let me evict the housemate who has made my life in my own home that I owned for 11 years and lived in with my 2 children a living hell. And, pay me the money that I’ve lost for all these years of being forced to house her without pay and without recourse (not to mention the money lost in the likely eventual short sale I’ll likely have to do as a result of this).

The eviction moratorium is a band-aid that’s causing the exact problem it’s trying to fix. It needs to end. NOW.