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.
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.
I feel like people should really read this part and fully absorb what it means.
It’s not that surprising, courts require specific hard evidence. Getting the roommates present to testify may or may not be enough, but it’s far more difficult than showing unpaid rent or a hoarding situation.
Oh, boo hoo. A landlord actually having to do work. How awful, this is truly a tragedy of unspoken proportions
Been a landlord for almost 20 years. I’ve rebuilt some of these houses myself from an auctioned off unlivable disaster to a safe, clean, maintained property. To imply landlords don’t work is such a narrow sighted view of reality. I got a glimpse during covid of an eviction moratorium a tenant that had quite a bit of hardship and I worked with her for 5 years pre-covid. Heating oil run out she couldn’t afford I filled it out of pocket for her and her family. If she needed flexibility on rent timing I worked with her. When she snuck an untrained dog classified as an emotion support dog that chewed up the house’s 70 year old woodwork stairs and balusters. I worked with her. When covid hit and the moratorium was about to go live her lease was up1 month prior. She ceased paying rent and utilities, I was informed I’d have to cover all her expenses during the moratorium. If she hadn’t had that lease end right before this moratorium she would’ve continued staying there for free while I covered her family’s entire housing and utilities. In the end my thanks for covering her and enforcing the lease end date was an entire house abandoned and full of trash and pest. Took my wife and I almost 2 months and close to $5000 to clean, repaint, repair/replace that property on top of the maintenance costs. This isn’t a black and white situation…
Tldr, I guess: Evictions are a last resort for people who have had an agreement no longer be met by the other party. Should never have mad a moratorium on that legal process imo, it needed to have flexibility to help both parties not just shoulder 1 party with all the responsibility. The party is in extremely poor taste but I can understand their relief if they have similar tenants they can hopefully divest of after years of what my example held. I wouldn’t have been able to do it for 3 years financially or mentally.The distinction is in the role of being the owner of the property versus the property manager and superintendent.
Landlords that also assume the role of property manager or superintendent for the land or buildings they lease do work.
But their role as owner and collector of rent is divorced from upkeep. The wealthier the landlord, the more removed and absentee they can be from their property. And the reality of that specific dynamic is just shining in the example of this kind of party.
“We prefer to be called ‘housing providers’”
I’ll call you extortionists. Take it or leave it.
“We prefer to be called ‘housing providers’”
Landlords provide housing like scalpers provide concert tickets.
Concerts fundamentally have a limit or capacity. There is no such thing for housing. All current restraints are arbitrarily chosen and we can change them if we want to.
At the root, housing in the US and especially California is a tragedy of the commons where it is in no current owners interests to allow more construction. So all of them have created a homeowners lobby to make new construction illegal.
So you’re saying housing has a fundamental limit?
I mean you could say the same about concerts. They have a fundamental limit because the venue refuses to build a bigger space.
We do have bigger venues. But no matter how large the venue, the concert has to be in a venue which has a capacity limit.
No such thing exists for housing.
No. We built our cities wrong, and artificially created a limit. If we were to admit that suburbs are nothing but an economic drain, and rezoned properly to mixed use medium to high density in the cities, and no more suburbs, or tax the suburbs properly and stop subsidizing them, we would have walkable cities with plenty of housing.
Just in Imperial Beach, we could turn these 4 sq miles from being able to support ≈26,000 people to being able to house ≈250,000 which would greatly expand the city’s ability to fund badly needed infrastructure. Doing this nationwide would cause a housing crash, and cost many rich people money.
You could say the same about a given venue for a concert, however. The city is the venue for housing
You seem to think that houses just spring magically from the ground without any huge financial cost to build them.
Hi, landlord here and I want to clear up any misconceptions. I don’t build any houses, I only buy them up and then rent them out at a profit.
Hi renter here,
I just rent and want you to subsidies my living expenses so I can profit from you.
I do have an entitled given by god.
Happy to rent to you! Let’s not get confused though, you’ll be paying for all of your own living expenses as well as for mine. Due every month on the first.
“I don’t build them, i just pay the people who build the houses to do it”
You really think thats such a big distinction?
It’s quite a big distinction to me, I’m not a fucking construction worker. Gross. I also don’t usually pay anybody to build a house, I mostly scoop up already existing homes whenever there’s a market crash and the lazy poors get foreclosed on.
So when you “Scoop up existing homes” you don’t realize you’re paying the person for paying the builders?
I like this “i didnt lay every single atom of the house” argument lol
No, I’m quite literally not, in any way. I’ll take just one of my many investment properties to explain to you how dumb you’re being. This house was built in a suburb of San Diego in 1979 and sold for $25,000. The people who built it are possibly dead by now and were, all together paid $25,000 for the land together with the house that they built. It changed hands many times, at some point a bank foreclosed on whoever was living there, and I bought it from the bank. The house is worth $775,000 dollars now and I rent it out for $3,500 a month. Every 7 months I make more money renting out this house than the people who built it were ever paid for doing that, and me buying it had absolutely nothing at all to do with it getting built.
Please stop trying to make me out to be a construction worker. I’m not, I’m a landlord and proud of it.
What are you talking about. Landlords build housing all the time. I can take a 5 minute walk and see several construction sites right now.
You’re confused. An honorable and successful landlord such as myself would not be caught dead walking around in a goofy looking hardhat swinging a wrench around or whatever construction people do.
