Evictions rise, tenants scramble for help as Los Angeles County protections expire
Irma Cervantes could barely afford the $750 monthly rent for the converted garage apartment she lives in with her children in East Los Angeles when she worked full time at a laundromat.
When the pandemic shut down non-essential businesses, Cervantes was out of a job. Then she got sick with long COVID-19.
Now she owes 10 months rent, she said, and is trying to pay it down. Her three children, ages 19 to 23, are helping by working part-time jobs.
Her landlord has increased demands for payment and wants her out, Cervantes said. And on March 31, L.A. County’s tenant eviction protections are set to expire.
“I’m left thinking, what will happen when there aren’t any protections,” Cervantes said. “What will I do with my kids? We can’t pay $1,600 rent.”
Across California nearly 600,000 people owe a total of $2.1 billion in back rent, researchers say. In Los Angeles city and county, nearly 200,000 people owe more than half a billion dollars in unpaid rent.
Many tenants, like Cervantes, are on edge because state protections and rental assistance across the state diminished, and now local protections like L.A. County’s are phasing out. Housing rights advocates and attorneys say eviction lawsuits already are rising in the state’s most populous county; they’re bracing for even greater spikes once county pandemic protections go.
“Because both state and local eviction protections enacted during the pandemic have come to an end, it’s an even bigger crisis,” said state Sen. María Elena Durazo, a Los Angeles Democrat, during a recent press conference.
Protections end
California’s statewide tenant relief and protections ended in June 2022. The pandemic-era programs had shielded many tenants harmed by COVID-19 from eviction and offered financial assistance to help them pay back rent.
Since then some city and county local measures kicked in to keep tenants in homes. Los Angeles County protections from evictions stepped in for city residents on Jan. 31.
L.A. County’s tenant protections don’t prevent landlords from filing eviction lawsuits, which are called unlawful detainer suits. But the protections do give certain low-income tenants a defense in court if their rent was late between July 2022 and March 31 of this year due to the pandemic.
Beginning April 1, landlords will be able to evict tenants for a variety of reasons, but they’ll have to give tenants 30 days’ notice.
However housing justice groups may be making headway in their push to extend some tenant protections.
County supervisors Lindsey P. Horvath and Hilda Solis are expected to propose a motion today that would protect tenants from no-fault evictions until March 2024. If it’s approved by a majority of the five supervisors, tenants who are paying rent could not be evicted, even if they had a pet or a person move in during the pandemic in violation of their lease.
Horvath said as a renter she recognizes that thousands would be at risk of losing housing after March 31 without this change, which is in keeping with L.A. Mayor Karen Bass’ efforts to reduce homelessness.
“If we are going to solve this crisis, we must stop the inflow of people falling into homelessness by keeping them in the housing they are already in,” Horvath said in a statement.
Patchwork of protection
Solis said it’s the county’s duty, as “the safety net for our most vulnerable,” to protect people from losing their homes.
Once countywide protections expire, tenant protections will return to a patchwork of local measures in some of the county’s 88 cities, leaving many renters without protection.
Already in L.A. County unlawful detainer filings for eviction have surged over the prior two years, when there were more layers of protection for tenants.
In 2020 and 2021, there were 13,796 and 12,646 unlawful detainer filings, respectively — record lows in what had been a steady downward trend in eviction filings since the 2008 recession, said Kyle Nelson, an eviction researcher at UCLA.
But last year there were 34,398 unlawful detainer filings in L.A. County. That’s not quite at 2019 levels, when there were 40,572 eviction filings, but experts expect another jump after the first back-rent deadline.
Even before state protections expired, housing analysts worried about a “tsunami” of evictions. Nelson said he now thinks that was an overestimation, but “we are seeing the wave.”
It could vary by city, though.
“I would expect the spikes to happen when the rental debt is due,” he said, ”because in various moratoria policies there are different windows for when debt for different periods of time is due.”
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