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.
The party is overall shitty I agree with that. I also don’t think people should be able to own more than one home just to get rental income and have someone else pay their mortgage. This depletes the housing supply and takes away wealth building opportunities for families trying to build their own wealth.
That being said, this could have been handled better. If tenants could pause rent then the banks should have paused payments on mortgages that qualify as well, or just all mortgages.
My view is that unless you have a heartbeat you can’t buy residential property. I’m not entirely against landlords because people want to rent, imagine having to buy everytime you went to a new city or place. But it should be diminishing returns from progressive tax policies that disincentivise multiple properties.
Renting out a home can make sense for other reasons too. I have a friend who moved to the UK for work and is renting out their house in the US for a few years as security in case the game company he got a job with goes under.
There are also people unable to deal with certain aspects of life and rentals give them freedom to live on their own but someone else maintains the property. It is a nice aspect of renting. Roof fails? Not my problem. Sewar issue? Someone else deals with it.
Good point. Do you think there should be any restrictions on who can own and rent these homes? Say only people from the community or state? It seems like there are a lot of foreign investors that buy a ton of homes. Then that rental money just leaves the community.
Foreign investors wouldn’t see much returns in buying if this was the case. They’d have drastically less profits and with each property they’d have a higher percentage tax to pay. So by the time they’d get to being a big investment firm that bought up properties on a large scale they’d be paying 80+% of their income in taxes which isn’t viable, by design, and the money would be invested elsewhere.
But strictly speaking absolutely no foreign investment funds should be buying up housing stock.
I don’t even want a home to build wealth I just want a fucking place to live in that I can build on and work on my hobbies. I couldn’t give less of a shit if the value never goes up.
Housing prices don’t need to change to build wealth. You are just keeping your money in your house instead of giving it away to a landlord. Then if you need to move you have all you’ve accumulated instead of nothing.
Housing value on your primary residence going up is actually a bad thing for most owner-occupied properties in most localities. Higher value = higher taxes.
Not in California as much though thanks to prop 13 (which should only apply to owner-occupied properties but doesn’t… So there’s good and bad).
While it definitely could’ve been handled better, in the US at least you could pause your mortgage payments for a time. That doesn’t stop the property taxes though.
When I signed my mortgage I had to promise not to use those programs, I don’t know how legally binding that actually was though.
True but they should have been the same duration in my opinion. The property tax would have been ideal to pause too but wouldn’t that cause more problems for the local community instead of just the big banks?
AFAIK (NAL) any law supersedes a contract. So that doesn’t seem enforceable to me. They may be able to break the contract in that situation, saying you violated it. Then it would need to be handled in court with the bank likely having better lawyers.
Say it is written into the lease that the landlord only has to give one weeks notice for a tenant to move out. Both parties can sign it but the law says 30 days. The police would be called at the end of the week and say the tenant still has 2 weeks.
Yet you can give away certain rights like the right to sue so that may be a bad example.
Yeah I mean I agree that they should’ve been available for the same time, but I’m betting most landlords weren’t really in dire straits enough to use them in the first place.
I think that’s why they’re easily forgettable as available programs: most people that own never needed to use them.