City calls for input on evictions

EDITOR’S NOTE: (Update, Feb. 8) The final hearing of the eviction proposal has been indefinitely delayed to a future date. The proposal will not be discussed at the Feb. 12 city council meeting.

Two Santa Cruz City Council members are looking for your input on a proposal that would outlaw certain types of evictions. Learn about where they stand and why.
Contact Councilmember Donna Meyers at dmeyers@cityofsantacruz.com and Vice Mayor Justin Cummings at jcummings@cityofsantacruz.com.
A copy of the proposed law, as well as a transcript of this episode, are below. 

Kara Meyberg Guzman: Welcome to Santa Cruz Local, where we watch our public institutions and hold power to account. I’m Kara Meyberg Guzman.
In this episode: an update on eviction rules for the city of Santa Cruz. We’ll talk with Councilmember Donna Meyers and Vice Mayor Justin Cummings about what to expect this month.
If you remember our last episode the city council surprisingly delayed a controversial proposed law that would have limited who and in what circumstances a landlord can evict. The rules were meant to be temporary, lasting a year, while a city task force studies whether and how to enact permanent rent control and eviction rules.
But Cummings and Meyers tabled it at the last meeting. They said to the public: We want this law to reflect what you want, not just what the council majority wants. Let’s pause on this and have tenants and landlords hash this out.
So, since then, Cummings and Meyers have been meeting with folks, fielding calls and emails, trying to get a read on where people stand. And last week (Jan. 28) they led a small focus group, that included three landlords who voted no on Measure M as well as a few tenants rights supporters who campaigned for Measure M.
I spoke with Cummings and Meyers separately on the phone last week. I asked both of them where they stand on the proposed law and what we should expect.
Let’s hear from Donna Meyers first. I asked her what she’s heard from landlords.

MEYERS: They’re very nervous about it, and the main thing I’m hearing is that people continue to struggle with, really the inability to kinda control their property.
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KMG: Meyers is against the proposed law. She thinks outlawing certain types of eviction would shrink the city’s rental market. She says the council instead offer a mediation program for tenants and landlords, like some other California cities do.
She says it’s likely, though, that this council, with its progressive majority, will move forward with the proposed law.

MEYERS: We will probably be living with that for a while.

KMG: OK, so we don’t know this for sure yet, but the final hearing of the eviction ordinance is likely to be at the next council meeting on Tuesday, Feb. 12, so for those of you listening who want your voice to be heard, that’s the deadline to get in touch with Meyers and Cummings, who are actively seeking your input. Justin Cummings’ email is jcummings@cityofsantacruz.com and Donna Meyers’ is dmeyers@cityofsantacruz.com.

Now let’s hear from Justin Cummings.
Here I ask him about what his goals were with delaying the ordinance. When he mentions MHJ he’s referring to the Movement for Housing Justice, the tenants rights group that campaigned for Measure M.

CUMMINGS: My hope was to bring together folks from MHJ and some other landlords who genuinely wanted to work on it and point out things that were bad, and bring us together to propose something to the council. But… yeah. There were some folks who did not want to continue working on that process. As a result, we’re not sure where it’s at right now.
And so, because of the fact that there were some people there who flat out said, regardless of what came forward, they would not work on it,I think that what we really need to do is focus on folks who do care about tenants and want to help them, like those people who said they didn’t like M but they want to see something move forward. Because I think that we can all agree that we’re in a crisis and in order to help people in a crisis, decisions have to be made and we have to do something to move forward.

KMG: OK. So here, I tell Cummings about my conversation you heard with Meyers, and ask him whether he’s hearing the same message from landlords – that they’re afraid of losing control of their property.

CUMMINGS: Well, here’s the thing. If the message is, people are afraid of losing control of their property, what I want to know is, what is the issue you have with the ordinance and the way that it’s written? And what will give you more of a sense of control? Because obviously, owner move in – that’s a sense of loss of control. And if we’re thinking of pulling that out, what else do you have a problem with?
KMG: He’s talking about a part of the ordinance that allows owners to evict tenants when the owners or the owner’s family wants to move into the property. The proposed law would prevent these types of evictions if the tenant is 62 or older, disabled or terminally ill. He’s talking about removing that clause.

CUMMINGS: Because what we’re aiming at doing is not trying to take control over private property. What we’re trying to do is protect tenants who are living in properties, from landlords who would like to arbitrarily have them vacate the property for the purpose of increasing rents. Or in retaliation for working on Measure M.

KMG: Cummings described what he sees as a crisis for tenants. He says, around town, tenants are getting letters from their landlords giving them a month or two to leave. These are called notices to quit, and here it gets a little complicated, so bear with me. These notices are informal evictions, in which the landlord doesn’t have to report it to any agency and it doesn’t go on any records. If the tenant wants to contest the eviction, then they can go to court, in what’s called an unlawful detainer lawsuit.
If you’re a tenant, having that lawsuit on your record is really bad because it shows up in simple background checks and landlords will be hesitant to rent to you. If you’re a tenant, you do not want to go to court.
So a lot of the time, when tenants get the notice to quit, they’ll just leave, because maybe they can’t afford a lawyer, or they don’t want to have the lawsuit on their record.
And now, the game has changed, because last month city council passed a law that says if a landlord raises rent more than 5 percent a year, or 7 percent over two years, then they owe the tenant two months rent as a “relocation fee”  if the tenant decides it’s too much and they want to move out.
So now, Cummings says, some landlords are giving tenants notices to quit, so they can raise rents once the tenant leaves, and avoid that fee. And for tenants, once they leave, they can’t find a place to live in Santa Cruz because the market’s so tight.
What I should say here is that we don’t know the extent of this problem since we don’t have any data on notices to quit. When Cummings describes it, he talks in anecdotes, telling stories about people he’s heard of who this has happened to.
But I checked Cummings’ description of the problem with a tenant-landlord lawyer in town, and they agreed that it jives with what they’re seeing. The lawyer spoke to me on the condition of anonymity because they represent both tenants and landlords, and the landlords would be mad if they knew what the lawyer was saying, the lawyer said.
A lot of times, when tenants have lived in a place for several years, they can’t afford the new market rates. Like, a tenant on a fixed income may have been paying $1,500 a month, for an apartment that’s now a market rate of $2,800 a month, which they just can’t afford. And landlords know this – if they want to charge market rate, it doesn’t make sense for them to raise rent on someone who clearly can’t pay it, because then landlords would owe the relocation fee. So it’s better for the landlord to just evict the tenant, then raise rent, because in this tight market they know they can find someone willing to pay.
So, back to Cummings, to wrap up that point:

CUMMINGS: If it’s for the purposes of maintenance, fixing the place up, and they need to raise the rent to get back a return on their investment, that’s fine. I think it’s justifiable for people to raise their rents for those reasons. But when you have situations, say, ‘Oh, I’m taking the house off the market’ and then the person moves out and shortly afterwards it’s for rent again, and so they get more money and they slap a coat of paint on and they bring in the carpet cleaner, that is not, that’s not OK. And you know, we live in a community where people are really struggling in terms of our base, and if we want to have people in our service industries, we have to make sure they’re going to have to afford to live here.

KMG: That’s it for this episode. Stay tuned for the next council meeting on Tuesday, Feb. 12, when we expect to hear what Cummings and Meyers come up with, as a a compromise on the city’s eviction rules.
I also want to add here that one of our goals with Santa Cruz Local is to increase your engagement with your local government, so if you have anything you would like Cummings and Meyers to know about the eviction ordinance, I’d urge you to reach out to them now. We’ve posted their contact info along with a copy of the ordinance on our website, santacruzlocal.org.
Thanks for listening to Santa Cruz Local. Thanks to Podington Bear, at soundofpicture.com, for the music. See you next time.