Landlords rage over Oakland’s eviction moratorium

Oakland is not willing to end its moratorium on evictions despite the shouts of landlords who feel strangled because they can’t boot non-paying tenants.

Landlords and their allies created an uproar when Council President Nikki Fortunato Bas announced this week the council had no plans to discuss ending the pandemic-era protections, the San Jose Mercury News reported.

Their shouting grew so disruptive that Bas asked security to escort the rowdiest participants from the chamber.

Councilwoman Rebecca Kaplan said an email had circulated among landlords falsely suggesting the moratorium was on the council’s agenda.

Before the meeting, protesters outside City Hall demanded an end to the ban — enacted by cities and counties across the Bay Area early in the COVID-19 pandemic to prevent tenants who couldn’t pay rent from being kicked out of their homes.

“It’s been three years too long,” John Williams, an Oakland landlord who last year sued Alameda County over the eviction bans, said when the meeting resumed. He described how one of his tenants has stopped bothering to pay rent ever since the pandemic struck.

“When COVID came on, the beast came out,” he said.

Oakland is now one of the few cities in the Bay Area to maintain its eviction ban, in addition to Berkeley, San Francisco and San Leandro, according to the Mercury News.

Tenant protections launched during the pandemic were unprecedented, guaranteeing residents could stay in their homes despite economic struggles. Housing advocates say it wrenched power from landowners in a region punished by the state’s housing shortage.

“The economic impacts from COVID have not ended, and the burden of the crisis has not been carried equally,” Shaketa Redden, the executive director of Causa Justa, a group that has fought to keep tenant protections across the region in place.

But as the country moves past the pandemic, property owners say they’ve been deprived of needed rental revenue.

“My tenants have taken advantage of me to the point I can’t breathe,” said Cynthia Lam, a landlord in the city’s Eastmont neighborhood.

Eviction bans in other parts of the Bay Area have long since expired — the one in Contra Costa County ended in late 2021. But a federal judge last year ruled against a lawsuit that sought to immediately end both Oakland and Alameda County’s moratoria.

A landlord group, which has likened banning evictions to theft, similarly shut down an Alameda County supervisors meeting last month amid a widely-publicized hunger strike by Jingyu Wu, a landlord who said he was going bankrupt from not receiving enough rent from his San Leandro property.

“I’m not against tenants,” Wu said at the meeting. “But I also need help; I also need protections. … Don’t bully me, don’t discriminate (against) housing providers.”

Soon afterward, the county board agreed to lift its own moratorium, which doesn’t include Oakland, at the end of April, according to the Mercury News.

In Alameda County, an estimated 32,900 households last month owed a combined $125 million in unpaid rent, according to researchers with the National Equity Atlas. 

— Dana Bartholomew