Oakland to consider phasing out controversial eviction moratorium

An outcry by Oakland landlords about a pandemic-era policy barring them from booting non-paying tenants has caused the city to ramp down its eviction moratorium.

An ordinance to possibly end the tenant protections that prohibit most evictions will likely be considered by the City Council on April 11, the East Bay Times reported.

At the same time, council members will also consider buttressing “just cause” protections that make it tougher for landlords to evict tenants who pay rent for the first 12 months.

Most Bay Area cities and counties adopted moratoria on evictions in the early days of the pandemic, but Oakland has held onto its ban for much longer. It joins San Francisco, Berkeley and San Leandro in continuing to apply the protections.

Tenant rights advocates have urged cities to hang onto their moratoria, arguing that numerous workers in the region still face post-COVID economic stress.

But landlords, who say they’re strangled because they can’t boot non-paying tenants, created an uproar last week when City Council President Nikki Fortunato Bas announced the council had no plans to discuss ending the pandemic protections, forcing Bas to halt the meeting and call for security.

Previously, landlords also shut down an Alameda County supervisors meeting in February, 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.

Then Bas appeared to reverse course, saying she had been consulting with experts about how the city could “phase out” those policies.

“This has been in the works for some time, and I’ve been actively meeting with people to let them know I would be scheduling it,” Bas said at the council’s rules committee, which sets future agenda items.

Under the new ordinance, landlords still must prove tenants breached the terms of their lease, and give three-days notice for unpaid rent before proceeding with an eviction, according to the newspaper.

In addition, tenants can still avoid being kicked out if they can demonstrate lost income or other financial hardship due to COVID-related setbacks, according to the proposal authored by Bas and Councilman Dan Kalb.

Chris Moore, a representative of the East Bay Rental Housing Association, said the city’s moratorium was bankrupting Oakland’s landlords.

The moratorium, he said in an email, is “largely putting small and local housing providers out of business and in turn, reducing the supply of housing in the community.”

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