Tenants say a three-year eviction ban kept them in the house. Landlords say they are drowning in debt
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Retiree Pamela Haile has paid property taxes, insurance and other bills on a home she rents out in Oakland, but her tenants haven’t paid rent for more than three years thanks to one of the longest-running eviction bans in the country.
The eviction moratorium in the San Francisco Bay Area city ends next month, and Haile can’t wait. The 69-year-old estimates she owes more than $60,000 in back rent, money she doubts she’ll ever see. In addition, the tenants destroyed her house and it will cost tens of thousands of dollars to make it habitable, she says.
“It’s unbelievable and it’s like, how can they have the guts to let something like this happen? If this happened to them, how would they feel?” Haile said about her tenants. “Dealing with this whole thing makes me so upset.”
At the start of the 2020 pandemic, deportation moratoria were put in place in the US to prevent displacement and contain the spread of the coronavirus. Most expired long agobut not in Oakland or neighboring San Francisco and Berkeley, all places where rents and homelessness are high.
While it is more common for tenants to congregate at town halls in California to demand more protectionin Oakland and surrounding Alameda County, small landlords staged protests earlier this year demanding an end to moratoria.
Many of the landlords were black, like Haile, or Asian-American, and they said the eviction ban had saddled them with debt and foreclosure concerns while their tenants, who have jobs, live rent-free.
They berated elected leaders for allowing tenants to self-declare that their inability to pay was related to the pandemic. Unlike big corporate landlords, these small property owners said they didn’t have the resources to evict their homes and were swallowed up in worry.
“It’s not natural to be forced to house and have people live in your property for more than three years and not pay,” said Michelle Hailey, who is also black and owns a triplex where both of her tenants no longer live. pay. “There’s nothing natural, ethical or even humane about that.”
Alameda County let its moratorium expire at the end of April. In Oakland, it ends on July 15. Tenants in most cases must start paying rent in August, but cannot be evicted for rent arrears if their financial hardship has been caused by the pandemic.
Moratorium supporters called the bans a lifesaver that housed countless families and kept them off the streets. They said low-income residents are still struggling with the pandemic and need protection from ruthless landlords.
Nationwide, eviction requests have come back roaring since the bans ended — up to more than 50% higher than the pre-pandemic average in many cities, according to Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, which tracks filings in three dozen cities and 10 states.
In Alameda County, California, filings exceeded 500 in May, compared to 65 in April before the ban ended. That surpassed enrollments that averaged in the 300s before the 2019 pandemic.
In Oakland, a city with a rich black history, some black families who migrated from the South during World War II were able to buy homes despite redlining and other discriminatory practices from banks and the government.
But a recession and subprime mortgage crisis, followed by soaring home prices and gentrification, displaced many black residents, and homelessness escalated.
Carroll Fife, a black city councilor and housing advocate, called for a housing overhaul that focuses on homes for people rather than profits for the few. She acknowledged that some people “abused the moratorium,” but says most tenants desperately needed the help.
Hailey, the owner of the triplex, considers herself lucky to have been able to earn back some money through a rental assistance program. The tenants have moved out, but she has a pile of bills and can’t afford to renovate.
She bought the property in 1999 after making a lot of money writing some songs on the first Destiny’s Child album. The artist thought the triplex would provide steady income and help fund her retirement.
“So this was my whole plan, and I just watched it go up in smoke,” says Hailey, 59. “We’ve never had a situation where you would have government-sanctioned freedom not to pay your rent.”
Haile doesn’t know why the family that rented the house her parents left her stopped paying rent in April 2020. The property management company said they couldn’t ask because of the eviction ban.
Reached by The Associated Press, on the advice of a community nonprofit, the tenant, Martha Pinzon, said she stopped paying after she lost her job as a housekeeper at the hotel during the pandemic-induced closure in March 2020. Even now she can’t afford the $1,875 monthly rent on her wages as a custodian at a homeless shelter.
Pinzon’s 19-year-old daughter, Brigitte Cortez, said the moratorium gave her mother “peace of mind” during the pandemic. She said the property management company ignored their requests for repairs for years.
“Since we moved here, we’ve had a lot of problems in this house,” she said, adding that they are looking for a new place to live.
Haile says the tenants never asked for repairs.
John Williams, 62, hopes three years of worry and stress will come to an end.
Williams, who is part of a lawsuit against Oakland and Alameda County over the bans, said his tenant stopped paying the $1,500 monthly rent when the pandemic began. She gave no explanation as she operated a storage company out of the apartment and would not cooperate so he could get money from the city’s rent reduction program, he said.
As a black man, Williams had faced rent discrimination and thought his Victorian duplex in West Oakland would be a way for him to retire and house others. He started renting to the mother with two children in 2013.
In late 2020, he tried to sell the house, but she refused to move and the sale fell through. By the end of 2021, Williams was so stressed that he was hospitalized, incapacitated and unable to work. He was forced to move to the unit above his tenant. It no longer felt like his home.
The tenant has not returned messages from the AP left on a phone number of a business it operates.
Williams supports the goals of the eviction ban, but wishes the city had considered landlords like him. He was on the verge of losing his home on May 1, but was saved by a state mortgage relief program that began accepting applications this year from landlords living in their duplexes and triplexes.
He plans to leave town.
“I don’t want to be a house provider in Oakland,” he said. “This has been a really tough time.”
