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 theory is that without landlords, there are a lot more houses on the market, driving down prices.
Edit: I’m just relaying the theory. Take your arguments and downvotes elsewhere. So glad I’m done renting, though. I don’t envy anyone that is stuck with it.
Ok let’s say that happens and house prices drop by half. What bank is lending an 18 year old 100-150k that’s making minimum wage? It’s still a minimum of 3.5k down payment as well.
An 18 year old living under a bridge too because there was no house for them to rent.
How does that theory work? Landlords don’t just sit on empty houses. They make no money if it’s not rented.
I’m afraid they do, and I’m completely against it. They make money on capital gains. And also by using the houses as equity to make other investments. Those are the big fish though, most landlords own only one or two houses.
That requires them to sell the property. Just like stocks don’t actually make money until you sell them. And that kind of appreciation comes as ebbs and flows… I bought my house at 259k… According to Zillow it’s now worth ~410k. In order to actually realize the 150k worth of value I have to sell the house, or take money out against the house. Then when the market inevitably bursts… I’m negative in the house.
If you’re negative in the house and miss a single payment you probably don’t have a house anymore. Nothing of this is making money on a house while it’s empty. And if they’re not paying the mortgage on it… the bank will simply take it, including the loans you’re assuming that they can borrow against houses for other investments… ultimately this ONLY works if the house is rented (or they’re working some other job that allows them to pay the loan payments.)
Stocks sometimes (or even often) bear dividends. They can also split, and in some cases you can borrow against them.
You can also borrow against real estate holdings. I’m not sure if helocs (home equity lines of credit) have specific borrowing requirements, but if they don’t you can just borrow and use that money to pay the mortgage and taxes for a time.
I think this is all for small time landlords though. If you own a giant building with lots and lots of units, you may not require all or even most of the units to be rented in order to turn a profit, and there may be many scenarios in which case it makes sense to drive pricing higher through artificial scarcity than try to rent all of your units.
None of what you said is incorrect, but there are houses sitting empty that could be rented out. More than I expected in my city.
It’s a small percentage of course, and I expect that the houses are in really rich areas that increase in valuation at a faster rate than the cost of owning an empty house. I’m not an expert on this though.
If we’re spending time chasing down 1% or less of all houses out there to punish people… then we’ve lost the point… The real answer is to build more housing, not chasing down the people who are “hoarding” it.
It’s simple logistics… increase supply or decrease demand. In this case demand is a static small increase year after year. This is bad policies (usually at the local level) that stops builders from building more houses (or only building mini mansions because that’s what local government incentivized through building code or otherwise [otherwise being that they collect most taxes out of that group of people]).
Agreed, actually recently we had those exact policy changes and now there is construction happening everywhere.
I’d ask where you live where that’s happening (Just the mythical fact of bullshit laws getting repealed makes this place you live sound like unicorn levels of legendary…) but I don’t want you doxxing yourself. I see countries in the EU resist these random bullshit laws and they continue to do fine year after year. It’s make my dual citizenship look really appealing… Just up and leave and go somewhere where there’s more sensibility and logic.
I’m on an NZ instance, so it’s pretty easy to guess. Compared to the US it is kind of legendary. The downside is we are a tiny island in the middle of nowhere.
Ohhh right, so now that we have had landlords bear the cost of building extra housing, and therefore providing a benefit to society, only now do we not need landlords. I get it.
You can make things to sell, you know