Landlords fail to end eviction moratorium

City Council president asks security to remove rowdiest protesters from raucous meeting

OAKLAND >> Despite a protest by unhappy property owners that briefly halted an Oakland City Council meeting Tuesday, the city is not yet willing to end its moratorium on evictions.

The landlords and their allies created an uproar Tuesday when Councilmember Nikki Fortunato Bas announced that the council had no plans on its agenda to discuss ending the pandemic-era protections.

Their shouting grew so disruptive that Bas, the council president, asked security to begin escorting the rowdiest participants out of the chamber.

Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan said an email had previously circulated among landlords falsely suggesting that a discussion of the moratorium was on the council's agenda.

Before the meeting, protesters outside City Hall demanded an end to the ban — enacted by cities and counties across the Bay Area in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic to prevent tenants who couldn't pay rent from being kicked out of their homes.

“It's been three years too long,” said John Williams, an Oakland landlord who last year sued Alameda County over the eviction bans, said when the meeting eventually resumed. He described how one of his tenants has stopped bothering to pay rent ever since the pandemic struck.

“When COVID came on, the beast came out,” he said.

Oakland is now one of the few cities in the Bay Area to maintain its eviction ban; others include Berkeley, San Francisco and San Leandro.

Tenant protections established during the pandemic were unprecedented, guaranteeing that residents could remain in their homes despite economic struggles. And housing advocates say it wrenched away power from landowners in a region where California's housing crisis is especially punishing.

“The economic impacts from COVID have not ended, and the burden of the crisis has not been carried equally,” Shaketa Redden, the executive director of Causa Justa, a group that has fought to keep tenant protections across the region in place.

As the country moves past the pandemic, however, property owners say they've been deprived of much-needed rental revenue.

“My tenants have taken advantage of me to the point I can't breathe,” said Cynthia Lam, a landlord in the city's Eastmont neighborhood.

Eviction bans in other parts of the Bay long since have expired — the one in Contra Costa

County ended in late 2021. But a federal judge last year ruled against a lawsuit that sought to immediately end both Oakland and Alameda County's moratoriums.

The landlords group, which has likened banning evictions to theft, similarly shut down an Alameda County supervisors meeting last month 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.

“I'm not against tenants,” Wu said at the meeting. “But I also need help; I also need protections … Don't bully me; don't discriminate (against) housing providers.”

Soon afterward, the county board agreed to lift its own moratorium, which doesn't include Oakland, at the end of April.