Oakland City Council votes to end three-year eviction moratorium

Oakland landlords this summer can finally kick out their non-paying tenants.

The City Council has voted 7-1 to end the city’s three-year pandemic eviction moratorium on July 15, while adding permanent “just cause” protections, the San Jose Mercury News reported.

Council President Nikki Fortunato Bas, author of the legislation, said she hoped it would meet “our broader goals of housing stability, homelessness prevention and certainty about the end of the moratorium.” 

Tenants won’t owe back rent unpaid since the eviction moratorium took effect in March 2020 as long as they can demonstrate financial losses due to the pandemic.

And landlords can’t kick out a tenant who owes less than a month of what’s considered fair rent for a similar market apartment.

Oakland had been one of the last cities in the Bay Area — along with San Francisco, Berkeley and San Leandro — to keep its eviction moratorium, months after the state ended its COVID-19 state of emergency.

It took city officials weeks to dial in details of the new ordinance amid contentious debate and numerous demonstrations between East Bay landlords and renters.

Landlords showed up in force to describe financial hardships caused by the moratorium. Many property owners said they resented how tenants have painted them as money-hungry villains.

The property owners had the backing of Councilmember Noel Gallo, who cast the lone dissenting vote on the ordinance, saying “we should find a way to work with the small landlord… to make sure that they’re able to be compensated, maintain their property, be respected.”

“What we’re doing today is going to discourage those that may have had an interest, who had an extra room,” Gallo said, “because they don’t want to get into a situation that we’re (in) here today.”

An uproar around the eviction ban engulfed Councilwoman Carroll Fife, who had rebuked several landlords for suggesting they had become slaves to their tenants because of the moratorium. She later walked back her words.

“For folks who are saying that this is slavery, shame on you. How dare you,” Fife, who is Black, had said. “I don’t want to hear another white, yellow, whatever person talk about what my ancestors experienced being enslaved and making that akin to being a landlord — never again.”

— Dana Bartholomew