While the Sacramento Democrats are socialists, they are well aware they could be thrown out of office. They are nervous about November. Not because of the Republicans, but because the people of California are fed up with the failed, corrupt leadership of Newsom and his buddies.
“So why did Assembly Bill 854, which would have curbed an owner’s ability to evict their tenants using the Ellis Act in rent-controlled jurisdictions, die without even a floor vote in the Democratic-supermajority Assembly?
Proponents of the longtime progressive priority — which promised to preserve the stock of affordable apartments amid a historic shortage — point to an aggressive campaign mounted by the deep-pocketed real estate industry.”
They could not kill off health care—and parents are fighting back at the racist failed government schools. Folks are upset about crime and high taxes have killed the economy. So do not be surprised if Chinese style legislation fails—Democrats prefer power to policy.
Why is a tenant protection bill failing in the California Legislature, again?
by Manuela Tobias, CalMatters, 2/13/22
Tenant advocates, racial equity groups, YIMBYs and even some of their usual opponents wanted to see the bill pass.
The cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles — which rarely see eye to eye on housing issues — as well as every Democrat on the Assembly Housing and Community Development Committee had signed on.
So why did Assembly Bill 854, which would have curbed an owner’s ability to evict their tenants using the Ellis Act in rent-controlled jurisdictions, die without even a floor vote in the Democratic-supermajority Assembly?
Proponents of the longtime progressive priority — which promised to preserve the stock of affordable apartments amid a historic shortage — point to an aggressive campaign mounted by the deep-pocketed real estate industry.
“It’s insane to see so many groups working really hard on this and then still for it to not be enough because the opposition’s influence on our legislature is so immense,” said Sarah Abdeshahian, an advocate at the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which co-sponsored the bill.
But just as a diverse group of advocates coalesced to support the bill, thousands of property owners — even those outside unincorporated Los Angeles County and 20 rent-stabilized cities directly affected — opposed it, united by a sense that the state is chipping away at their rights, just as COVID-19 has decimated their business.
“‘It may not be in my area, but it could be, next time,’” Sanjay Wagle, senior vice president of governmental affairs at the California Association of Realtors, said his members told him. “I think there’s a growing sense of sort of commonality of interest, which may not have existed before, between the Fresno property owner and the San Francisco property owner.”
Assemblymember Alex Lee, the Democrat from San Jose who authored the bill, says the legislation would have passed out of the Assembly and over to the state Senate but for the recent departures of four Democrats: Lorena Gonzalez from San Diego, Ed Chau from Monterey Park, David Chiu from San Francisco and Jim Frazier from Fairfield.
Lee is still weighing whether to reintroduce “substantially the same bill” next year or this legislative cycle — an option left on the table by having avoided a losing floor vote. Similar bills have been introduced, unsuccessfully, at least three times before.
“All those things are on the table luckily, and that’s something we’re still working out with our coalition, given the volatility of resignations,” Lee said. “That’s always our wild card.”
“This issue has been around for years and I understand the vote got very close, with significant new support for many corners,” said Chiu, former chairperson of the Assembly Housing and Community Development Community, who co-authored the bill last year and is now San Francisco city attorney. “And so I’m hopeful that there will be a real conversation about this in the coming months.”
Protecting small landlords — or big business?
The bill took aim at the Ellis Act, a 1985 state law that allows owners of rent-controlled properties to evict their tenants if they take all the units of a building off the rental market – a path that could otherwise be blocked by local governments guarding the precious stock of affordable units. Once off the market, those apartments can be sold as condos or demolished to make way for new homes.
More than 27,000 rent-controlled units have been removed in Los Angeles since 2001 using the Ellis Act, while San Francisco has lost about 5,000 units since then. And they’re sorely needed: the California Housing Partnership estimates 1.2 million low-income renter households don’t have access to an affordable home, and building a new government-subsidized unit costs an average of $500,000.
Lee’s bill mandated a five-year holding period before evicting tenants — an attempt to allow struggling property owners to go out of business, as had been the law’s original intent, while preventing speculators from buying up cheap properties and flipping them overnight. The bill also restricted the use of such evictions to one building per owner per decade.
That would significantly curb Ellis Act evictions, as three-quarters of evictions in Los Angeles between 2016 and 2019 occurred within five years of purchase, according to a recent analysis by Alexander Ferrer, policy and research analyst at SAJE in Los Angeles. But because of a glaring lack of transparency around who owns buildings in California, the effect on mom-and-pop landlords — a group the Legislature holds dearly — is difficult to determine.
In an opposition letter to lawmakers, the California Association of Realtors asserted that the bill would devastate “Struggling Small Property Owners Who Are Seniors or Individuals of Color.”
“I think it’s concern-mongering for a problem that we don’t know exists,” Ferrer said, citing the lack of demographic data on property owners. Wagle cited anecdotal evidence from their members.
Ferrer’s analysis found that owners who had a property registered under their own name evicted tenants, on average, eight years after purchase — while limited liability companies, responsible for more than half of those evictions, did so in an average of just three years. But in California, it’s not uncommon for individual property owners to put even a single rental into an LLC.
That means a bid to win more votes — an amendment that carved out an exemption for “natural persons” who own no more than four residential units — is “not logical,” according to Debra Carlton, executive vice president and chief lobbyist for the California Apartment Association.
Ferrer found 45% of Ellis Act evictions during that time period in Los Angeles were filed by owners who held five properties or less – L.A. ‘s definition of a mom and pop landlord – a percentage Wagle, from the California Association of Realtors, says is not insignificant. Besides, he argued, the impact of the pandemic on small property owners should not be understated. Some landlords, he said, have gone nearly two years without rent payments, thanks to eviction bans, while still having to upkeep their properties.
“Among small rental property owners there’s this sense of, ‘Wait a minute. We’re enduring all these problems right now and again, more burdens are being placed,’” he said.
