Landlords Throw Party to Celebrate Being Able to Evict People Again
The Berkeley Property Owners Association's fall mixer is called "Celebrating the End of the Eviction Moratorium."
A group of Berkeley, California landlords will hold a fun social mixer over cocktails to celebrate their newfound ability to kick people out of their homes for nonpayment of rent, as first reported by Berkeleyside.
The Berkeley Property Owner Association lists a fall mixer on its website on Tuesday, September 12, 530 PM PST. “We will celebrate the end of the Eviction Moratorium and talk about what's upcoming through the end of the year,” the invitation reads. The event advertises one free drink and “a lovely selection of appetizers,” and encourages attendees to “join us around the fire pits, under the heat lamps and stars, enjoying good food, drink, and friends.”
The venue will ironically be held at a space called “Freehouse”, according to its website. Attendees who want to join in can RSVP on their website for $20.
Berkeley’s eviction moratorium lasted from March 2020 to August 31, 2023, according to the city’s Rent Board, during which time tenants could not be legally removed from their homes for nonpayment of rent. Landlords could still evict tenants if they had “Good Cause” under city and state law, which includes health and safety violations. Landlords can still not collect back rent from March 2020 to April 2023 through an eviction lawsuit, according to the Rent Board.
Berkeleyside spoke to one landlord planning to attend the eviction moratorium party who was frustrated that they could not evict a tenant—except that they could evict the tenant, who was allegedly a danger to his roommates—but the landlord found the process of proving a health and safety violation too tedious and chose not to pursue it.
The Berkeley Property Owner Association is a landlord group that shares leadership with a lobbying group called the Berkeley Rental Housing Coalition which advocated against a law banning source of income discrimination against Section 8 tenants and other tenant protections.
The group insists on not being referred to as landlords, however, which they consider “slander.” According to the website, “We politely decline the label "landlord" with its pejorative connotations.” They also bravely denounce feudalism, an economic system which mostly ended 500 years ago, and say that the current system is quite fair to renters.
“Feudalism was an unfair system in which landlords owned and benefited, and tenant farmers worked and suffered. Our society is entirely different today, and the continued use of the legal term ‘landlord’ is slander against our members and all rental owners.” Instead, they prefer to be called “housing providers.”
While most cities’ eviction moratoria elapsed in 2021 and 2022, a handful of cities in California still barred evictions for non-payment into this year. Alameda County’s eviction moratorium expired in May, Oakland’s expired in July. San Francisco’s moratorium also elapsed at the end of August, but only covered tenants who lost income due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
In May, Berkeley’s City Council added $200,000 to the city’s Eviction Defense Funds, money which is paid directly to landlords to pay tenants’ rent arrears, but the city expected those funds to be tapped out by the end of June.
I am sincerely sorry that you don't care about people's quality of life and ensuring everyone gets quality housing over your ideology.
And yet here you are celebrating poor people getting kicked out of their homes.
Less people got housing overall because grifters, not poor people were taking advantage. These largely were people that could otherwise afford it. It led to increased economic and societal barriers to starting new leases.
This policy didn't dismantle capitalism; it made the existing system more exclusive.
You're acting like rent grifting is some widespread problem. A vast majority of tenants aren't destroying where they live and taking advantage of their landlords. In reality eviction moratorium was put in place so landlords couldn't hike the cost of rent during the pandemic and that's how most tenants are using it. We're in a rolling recession and a lot of people are going to lose their homes because of this.
Literally none of the rest is true and I challenge you to prove it. We are not in a recession. Rent grifting as a perceived problem causing the above effects regardless of being able to put any numbers towards it one way or another.
I lost my home of over 7 years at the end of last year because the landlord decided to increase the cost by $900 a month even though I managed to pay them for every month of the pandemic via housing assistance etc, so you can fuck right off with saying none of it is true.
So your anecdote of your personal event is indicative of the entire market?
I'm sorry you had a bad time... but let's look at what you said.
You're implication here is that you've rented for 7 years, and apparently NEVER had a rent increase? That's insane on it's own. Now 7 years later you're complaining that there's finally a rent increase? Even though costs of maintaining a house has gone up over time... Those costs your landlord would have been eating for 7 years. Further, you never state what you were actually paying... If you were renting a $5000 house, and then it went up to $5900, that's actually expected as rent tends to increase at about 2.5%.
Now if it started at $750 and now it's increasing to $1650 with no changes to the property, then you might have a leg to stand on to complain... but please keep the emotions out of it. I used to rent at a condominium complex... Where each unit is owned. TONS of units would get trashed every year because the vast majority of renters do not know how to maintain a house... and don't want to learn/be liable for it. Those units were NEVER maintained properly, because they simply were not educated on how to perform that maintenance, and I'm talking simple things like cleaning up after a liquid spill on carpet.
Please point out in my reply where I said I never got a rent increase during that time. I'll wait.
Also, I don't need you or any other asshole on here telling me what a reasonable rent increase is for my area, for the property I inhabited for 7 years. I already know, and a $900 increase all at once, even for this area, was absurd for where I was renting. It was such a ridiculous increase that I couldn't justify it and had to move against my wishes, after being a model renter by most standards. I don't need to tell you more than that.
You would have brought it up. It strengthens your case to have paid rent increases over the years. The fact that you omitted it is obvious evidence that it didn't happen.
No, it's not obvious evidence, are you a dumb Republican or something? You made an assumption based on words I didn't say, that's not evidence of anything.
In reality I did pay an increase every year, and expected to pay another such reasonable increase for this year, but instead of something normal, it was drastically higher because my landlord took hits on a separate vacation property during the pandemic that had nothing to do with me, and decided to make up the difference with the property I was living in. So she priced me out so she could rip it up and do renovations, then rent it out someone who probably just moved here from California and doesn't know how stupid the price is. And if we had some kind of policy regarding rent control, and/or ejecting people out for these kinds of reasons, there would be far less people on this island trying to find a place to live. It's nothing but landlord greed, regardless of whether or not you agree with that.
Sounds like Renter entitlement to me... You admit that they want to do renovations to the property. Why should they cater to you if they can improve the property and get better rent for it? They want to add improvements. Those improvements have a cost associated with it... you're not willing to pay. That's that. You think that those improvements should be furnished to you for free?
But see, this is my point. You've left out the details that paint you poorly. Ultimately the owner has a right to do with their property as they please unless they violate the law or contract.
Honestly don't care, dude. You apparently are also some kind of entitled person talking out of your ass about something that happened to me.
Improvements weren't needed. At all. It's just the ongoing repeated cycle we have over here of owner's making unnecessary renovations just to resell it or re-rent it at much higher prices, usually at whatever they heard someone else was renting things for, which is why so many people who live here have trouble finding homes and possibly leave the state even though they shouldn't have to. Natives getting prices out of their own homeland by investors from the mainland.
You want to talk about entitlement? How about all these out-of-state companies calling Lahaina fire survivors to try to sweep up and take over their land? They're trying to do this exact this same thing, just the next version of the cycle.
See, to me you're the arrogant, entitled, ignorant one, because there's a whole different kind of housing politics going on here than anywhere else on the mainland. Similar, but way worse, partially because we're a tourist destination. You just won't actually understand until you've been here living with it, and remain ignorant with wrong opinions until you do.
I'm blocking you now. Enjoy your day.
A lot of those people don't have money to rebuild a house... Getting value for their land so they can live somewhere else is likely the only way out of poverty for a lot of those people. But you can feel free to dress it up however you want.
And considering you have no idea where I live... pot... kettle.
Yes because that's what adults do when they don't get their way in a conversation. They plug their ears screaming "LALALALA" rather than continuing rational conversations.
That has literally nothing to do with what the above poster claimed so you can cool your jets and consider that your landlord was only able to do that because they have a scarce resource, made more scarce by the above policies. I will not fuck right off while you folks make the situation literally worse. You can fuck off and let educated folks solve problems with real economic policies.
I made the situation worse? How exactly? I paid in full for every month I was there, my landlord didn't lose anything on me as a renter, and it didn't matter, still got priced out by an obscene raise in rent only done because we have zero rent control and there was nothing to stop her from getting away with it.
No, asshole, you can fuck off with your ignorance, I understood what Mooselad said perfectly well.
I'm referring to policies. You apparently didn't. I'm curious as to how you think your situation has any impact on the overall housing supply and accessibility to new renters? I'm not seeing the link but maybe I and every other housing policy expert are the dumb ones here.
I just said "zero rent control" in my last reply, that doesn't imply policy to you?
And rent control was literally not mentioned anywhere in this thread so it is your turn to fuck right off.
Rent control also hurts supply which hurts everyone trying to get housing except the lucky few who get in. It also locks in a steady rate of rent increase regardless of the market.
Building more housing gives people options which decreases landlord power.
From Mooselad's reply:
Learn to read.
I paid reasonable rent increases throughout the pandemic, and as soon as the eviction moratorium was up, my next lease renewal was raised ridiculously high and priced me out, which is exactly one of the things he's talking about.
An eviction moratorium is not rent control. It is much worse actually.
Learn to comprehend.
Literally posted today
Literally none of that is true? So you're saying a vast majority of tenants are destroying homes? That's delusional lol
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-economy-recession-outlook-rolling-hard-landing-growth-gdp-bofa-2023-7?op=1
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2023/01/26/what-rolling-recession-what-means-and-why-we-might-one/11126039002/
And there's another one. A rolling recession is not the same thing as a recession.
Not really their home if they’re not paying for it.
My house is my home because I pay for it.
They’re celebrating people who destroy their homes getting kicked out making it easier for other people (who likely need it just as much) to get in instead
Yes because most landlords are regularly getting their homes destroyed and only kick out people who destroy their homes. They would never kick people out to hike rent prices. And it's not like 9% of homes in America are just sitting vacant, right?
This alone means nothing...
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/08/united-states-housing-vacancy-rate-declined-in-past-decade.html
2010 it was 11.4%, and in 2020 it's now 9.7%. So either more houses that were vacant are no longer vacant... or the market has added more houses to the market overall that are not vacant to effectively scale the 11.4 down to 9.7%.
But there's a whole lot of caveats on how those numbers are generated as well...
So any "shared" housing such as timeshares... or second homes are all considered "vacant" even if they aren't and have people live in them for particular times of the year.
Now you can make the claim that people with multiple houses are monsters... fine, but that's a completely different thing than "9% of all houses are vacant". I would also wonder how many houses are "vacant" because they're literally unlivable. If you check the link the highest rates were states like Maine/Vermont/Alaska where no heat is literally a death sentence... but otherwise those houses would be unrentable.
I agree with him and also care that people get quality housing
Which would be easily possible if all the shitty landlords (including corps) weren't allowed to just hold onto properties like they currently can
We could easily house every homeless person in the US, but we dont
We could also build more housing but you'd rather focus on targeting those that already have it making it more scarce.
You should be, because that's a stupid-ass opinion and something went very wrong in your life (blow to the head as a baby?) that you could ever say it.
Your comment literally was just an insult and provided no argument. Why bother? It doesn't make you look mature.