Joint bill covers rent cap, eviction protection
A month after a push to protect California tenants from no-fault evictions fizzled in the state Assembly, lawmakers revived the effort Monday.
But the new strategy — making eviction protections part of a statewide rent cap bill — already is facing pushback from landlord interest groups. Now both measures face an uphill battle on their way to the governor’s desk.
“Millions of California renters are hanging on by a thread,” Assemblyman David Chiu, D-San Francisco, wrote in a news release. “Both large rent increases and predatory evictions lead to displacement and exacerbate our homelessness crisis. Just as tenants deserve protection from arbitrary, predatory rent increases, they deserve protection from arbitrary, predatory evictions.”
Assembly Bill 1481, which would have required landlords to provide an approved reason, or “just cause,” before evicting a tenant, died in May after lawmakers realized they didn’t have enough votes to carry the measure out of the Assembly. Several Bay Area cities, including San Jose, San Francisco and Oakland, already have just cause eviction policies.
On Monday, lawmakers announced that they were splicing their dead just cause bill onto a statewide rent cap proposal that still is marching through the legislative process.
Landlord interest groups were quick to condemn the move.
“Just cause eviction policies have failed communities across California. As a result, there are thousands of empty housing units that are not available for rent because of these restrictions,” Sid Lakireddy, president of the California Rental Housing Association, wrote in an emailed statement. “We will be taking a step backwards with a policy that discourages development of new housing and will further worsen the housing crisis for Californians.”
Chiu’s rent cap bill, AB 1482, passed 43-28 in the
Assembly in May. The new combined bill would cap rent hikes, even on properties not covered by existing rent control, at 7% per year plus inflation — which works out to a statewide average of about 9.5%. Now it also would prohibit a landlord from evicting a tenant of more than a year without providing just cause — such as failing to pay rent, breaking the lease agreement or creating a nuisance.
Only rental units that are 10 years old or older would be covered, and the bill would sunset after three years. Landlords who own 10 or fewer single-family homes would be exempt.
The California Apartment
Association, which has opposed both AB 1481 and AB 1482 from the beginning, said the joint bill’s eviction protections will make it harder for landlords to remove bad tenants. It’s not just a matter of having a good reason to evict someone — the landlord has to be able to prove it to a third party, spokesman Mike Nemeth wrote in an emailed statement. That can be challenging, particularly if the problem tenant is involved in illegal activity, and his or her neighbors are reluctant to testify about what they’ve seen.
“Adding ‘just cause’ to AB 1482 gives investors another reason to take their housing projects out of California,”
Nemeth wrote. “At the same time, it will lead current rental property owners, especially momand-pop owners, to take their units off the market rather than have to navigate a costly, expensive and time-consuming process to evict a bad tenant.”
The measure goes to the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 9. If it eventually passes a Senate floor vote, it will make its way back to the Assembly floor for a concurrence vote.
Advocates of combining the two bills say neither would have been successful on its own. Pass eviction protections without a rent cap, and landlords could use massive rent hikes to force tenants
out, Chiu and the authors of the original just cause bill, Assemblyman Rob Bonta, D-Oakland, and Assemblyman Tim Grayson, D-Concord, noted in their release. Pass a rent cap without eviction protections, and landlords could evict tenants to get around the rent cap.
While Monday’s announcement breathes new life into the eviction protection measures, it also could make the rent cap bill more difficult to pass. Tenant protection measures typically face a tough road in the Legislature, and the rent cap bill passed narrowly in the Assembly — even after the Realtors’ association dropped its opposition and despite the Democrats holding 61 of the Assembly’s 80 seats.
Gov. Gavin Newsom challenged legislators to pass tenant protection bills during his February State of the State address.
“It would be unacceptable to wait another year to pass legislation that provides meaningful protections to tenants,” Grayson wrote in the news release. “By amending AB 1482 to include both just cause and anti-rent gouging policies, we have the opportunity to finally provide real stability and security to Californians at risk of unfairly losing the roof over their head.”