Renters protection law extended three months

Those who have been unable to pay their rent, but who have already applied for assistance will benefit from the extension.

Residents who have not been able to pay their rent and were facing eviction, today, as a result of a law set to expire, will have at least another three months before they have to worry again.

The law that protected people from eviction due to unpaid rent because of the COVID-19 pandemic, was scheduled to expire at midnight on Thursday. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of California households had pending applications for rent relief and it would have been impossible for the state to process them all before the deadline. That would have meant those waiting to get the money could have been evicted beginning today.

But lawmakers voted, on Thursday, to ban evictions until June 30, for anyone with a pending applications. Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis signed the bill into law, on Thursday, because Gov. Gavin Newsom was on vacation, out-of-state, with his family.

“We’re not going to allow Californians to suffer, to lose their homes or even their income because of application processing times,” Assemblymember Tim Grason, D-Concord, said in an AP report.

He wrote the bill that would stop evictions for people who have applied for help. While it will help those who have already applied for assistance, it won’t give renters more to time to apply for the help. The application process was set to close at midnight on Thursday. That’s when California’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program planned to stop accepting new applications.

According to the AP report, housing advocates say many have not applied because they don’t speak English or have trouble getting the necessary documents together that would determine their eligibility.

“Some local governments have tried to pass their own laws to protect people from eviction,” the report said. “But state lawmakers have mostly stopped them from doing that at the request of landlords, who say they want consistency across the state instead of a patchwork of local laws. State lawmakers imposed statewide eviction protections, and in exchange local governments were prevented from doing so.”

We are still very much being affected, economically, by the pandemic. While most have probably recovered and returned to work and are able to pay their bills and rent, that’s not the case for everyone.

There are many who fell behind on other bills and even though they do have some income, have been unable to pay their rent because of that. Hopefully they have already been able to apply for assistance.