Bay Area tenant evictions spike after pandemic protections end

Home evictions across the five-county Bay Area have more than doubled since state and local pandemic protections have petered out over the past year.

From July of last year through June, the Bay Area had more than 6,300 eviction filings, with a surge after emergency tenant protections were rolled back in September, the San Jose Mercury News reported, citing a Bay Area News Group analysis of court cases.

The evictions shot up even higher as statewide safeguards were gradually lifted before expiring at the end of June.

Eviction cases rose sharply across Santa Clara, San Mateo, San Francisco and Contra Costa counties. The exception was Alameda County, where local tenant protections remain in place. Despite lower cases, it had more than 1,000 eviction court filings in June and July.

The rising number of court-led evictions still don’t come close to the number of tenants booted across the Bay Area before the pandemic, when 11,055 were recorded from June 2018 through July 2019.

Recent monthly evictions indicate all counties except Alameda could be on pace to match or surpass their pre-pandemic yearly totals.

Multiple landlord groups have sued to end the protections in Alameda County, which still allow evictions under certain circumstances. They argue moratoriums are no longer necessary, since the worst of the pandemic is over and most people have gone back to work.

Tenant advocates say they expect evictions to soar as many renters still struggle to recover from the economic fallout of COVID-19. In some cases, they’re stuck waiting on backlogged emergency public rent assistance programs.

“We’ve been seeing the eviction tsunami that we as tenant rights advocates had been warning about,” Nassim Moallem, acting supervising attorney at the non-profit Law Foundation of Silicon Valley, told the newspaper.

When the pandemic struck in March 2020, state and local governments enacted eviction moratoriums to protect struggling renters. The state also launched a $5.2 billion rent relief program, and many cities and counties created their own tenant assistance plans.

Even though some evictions were permitted under the moratoriums and rental aid programs were slow to dispense aid, they kept many tenants from losing their homes. But at the urging of landlord groups, the state allowed its eviction ban to expire in September 2021, while local bans were also lifted.

The state protections remained as long as struggling tenants applied for rent relief. But those safeguards were scaled back in March before expiring altogether on June 30, as 16,000 applications for rental relief remained pending across the Bay Area.

Because of those protections, Alameda County had the lowest eviction rate in the region last year, with one eviction filing for every 682 households, according to court data.

Next came Santa Clara with one for every 378 households; San Mateo at one for every 364 households; San Francisco with one for every 262 households; and Contra Costa with one for 228 households.

San Francisco has phased in a new COVID-19 eviction ordinance this year, but under state law it can only cover missed rent payments after July 1.

The two ongoing eviction bans in Alameda County and Oakland are disproportionately hurting small mom-and-pop landlords, who are often immigrants or people of color, said Derek Barnes, CEO of the East Bay Rental Housing Association. Many had to sell their properties after tenants didn’t pay the rent.

“When they get out of the business,” Barnes added, “those properties are often picked up by larger corporations that are not part of the community.”

— Dana Bartholomew

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