On Monday, March 29, the Biden administration decided to extend the federal executive order prohibiting the eviction of delinquent tenants during the Epidemic until June 30.
Nancy Li, who works in the real estate industry in California and is a member of the Chinese Landlords Association, said the ban on evictions during the epidemic is costing landlords a lot of money, as epitomized by the landlords living in California.
Since March of last year, California Governor Gavin Newsom has called for the protection of tenants who were unable to pay their rent during the epidemic, issuing a no-eviction order that has been renewed several times. As a result of these policies, Los Angeles has begun to hear about tenants deliberately defaulting on their rent payments, in addition to some tenants who are temporarily unable to pay their rent due to financial difficulties.
On the other hand, California’s housing rental market is also experiencing serious imbalance. Nancy said, “After a year-long ordeal, we landlords in California are at the end of our rope. There have been many marches before, but the government won’t listen to us.”
Elaine, a Chinese-American landlady in Los Angeles, said that policies such as California’s eviction ban condone tenants who deliberately do not pay their rent. She met a tenant who did not pay rent for many months and turned her house over to rent. She was forced to spend thousands of dollars to ask the tenant to leave all in vain.
Another landlord, Mr. East, said he encountered a tenant who had not paid rent for up to a year. “I’m retired and living on rent, the tenant is not paying rent and I can’t evict, I’m all hard and don’t know what to do.”
Nancy described how many of the landlords she knows have had similar experiences. She knows a landlord who encountered a long-term non-paying tenant and lost so much financially that he had to choose to sell his Home at a low price, losing up to nearly $100,000.
In addition to the eviction ban, landlords believe that various unfair bills in California have made it difficult for them to move forward, including California Democratic Assemblyman David Chiu’s proposal to force landlords to allow tenants to pay 15 months’ rent in arrears during the epidemic, and Democratic State Assemblyman Phil Ting’s proposal to reduce rent by 25 percent.
In late January, Newsom signed into law SB91, which, in addition to extending the eviction ban until June 30, allocated $2.6 billion in federal stimulus money to pay rent for non-paying tenants. The premise is that the government will only pay 80 percent, leaving 20 percent of the rent that landlords need to waive to recover.
Nancy said most of their landlords, including members of the landlord association, hardly anyone applied and were even very resistant. “To apply, landlords need to ask for a lot of information from their tenants. It would have made absolutely no sense for the government to force landlords to give up 20 percent of their rent. Secondly, there is no guarantee for this application, it’s not like if you apply, the government will approve it, and if it doesn’t, the landlord still won’t get the money.”
“If the landlord doesn’t agree to give up 20 percent of the rent, another (option) is to negotiate to recover 25 percent of the rent first, and the rest of the money will have to wait until the epidemic is over and the tenant can pay it back slowly. But if the tenant doesn’t even pay it back now, can they pay it back later? So these provisions are unrealistic, and landlords still don’t get their rent.”
She feels that the various current social problems are also related to California’s inability to fully open up its economy so far. “I have a tenant who owns a restaurant, and the restaurant was the worst affected during the epidemic. Last year it was barely paying, but this year he couldn’t pay and really didn’t have any money. He said he would pay me back later. I understand, I can only pray that he will pay it back later.”
“California is closed, cutting off a lot of people’s economic resources. If you don’t open the market, people can’t work, so they don’t have money. California has all kinds of policies that are really like the Communists, looting private property and disrupting the social order.” She said, “It’s been more than a year now, and we landlords really can’t do anything about it. As long as California doesn’t open up, the ban on evictions will definitely be extended again in June.”
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