Evictions are back up in Stanislaus County, after two years of a pandemic lull
After a significant drop in 2020 and 2021, the number of individuals facing eviction this year has returned to pre-pandemic levels.
In 2018 and 2019, Stanislaus Superior Court processed more than 3,636 eviction cases. The next two years, characterized by the COVID-19 pandemic, saw 1,654 evictions – fewer than half as many.
That pandemic-era trend is over now. The court already has processed more than 1,600 evictions this year alone, said Aurora Thome, director of the Tenant Justice Project through the California Rural Legal Assistance Inc.
The drop in evictions during the pandemic was primarily due to the COVID-era laws put in place to protect tenants, said Thome. She pointed to a law the state Legislature enacted in April 2020 that banned evictions except in cases in which the residences were unsafe to live in.
Though that law ended in September 2020, legislators put another regulation in its place that allowed evictions in more circumstances with one significant exception: a landlord could not evict someone for “nonpayment of rent.” If tenants could not pay rent because of “COVID-19 related financial distress,” they needed to prove they had applied for government rental assistance. Otherwise, the landlord could still evict.
At the start of the pandemic, the state of California received $5.2 billion in federal funds to help offset the cost of rent for low-income families.
“That’s why we definitely see those big drops in 2020 and 2021,” Thome said, adding that none of these laws ever provided a true end to evictions. After the first and most restrictive COVID-era law ended in September 2020, landlords still could evict tenants on a number of grounds, such as a violation of the terms of the lease, or to make repairs.
Further, if the state denied the tenant’s application for rental assistance, the landlord was allowed to move forward with an eviction. A quarter of applications were denied, according to a lawsuit filed by a group of California housing organizations. They argue that the state’s application process was confusing and inaccessible for many families. This spring, the rate of denials increased “dramatically,” the lawsuit says.
The entire rent relief program ended on April 1 of this year. In the months that followed, landlords no longer had to go through the state’s program to evict tenants for nonpayment of rent. The rate of evictions soon accelerated as a result.
Other entrenched issues in the county, like the lack of legal representation for tenants, also appear to have returned to pre-pandemic levels. While most landlords have attorneys, most tenants do not. In one New York City study, researchers found that tenants who have an attorney are more than twice as likely to win their cases.
As of June 30, 2022, Stanislaus Superior Court handled 281 cases in which the tenant lacked a lawyer in court. It also granted 382 default judgments, i.e., cases where the tenant did not respond in time to contest the eviction.
By comparison, in 2020, the court saw 339 self-represented tenants and issued 395 default judgments for the entirety of the year. The court will release the rest of its 2022 data in mid-January 2023.
While the current numbers suggest a return to pre-pandemic challenges, Thome said the data may reflect some cases from 2020 and 2021 in which the landlord was waiting for the laws to change.
While those COVID-era laws have now expired, giving landlords more power, Thome wonders if another California law, known as the Tenant Protection Act, could offer tenants some long-term protections.
The law, which went into effect in January 2020, set a cap on how much a landlord could raise the rent and restricted how landlords could evict people. The law includes many exceptions but provides Stanislaus County with the broadest set of rent control restrictions to date.
Thome is looking to 2023, when data from Stanislaus Superior Court will provide a better picture of the impact of that law.
