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.


  • MooseLad@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Yes because most landlords are regularly getting their homes destroyed and only kick out people who destroy their homes. They would never kick people out to hike rent prices. And it’s not like 9% of homes in America are just sitting vacant, right?

    • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.com
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      1 year ago

      And it’s not like 9% of homes in America are just sitting vacant, right?

      This alone means nothing…

      https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/08/united-states-housing-vacancy-rate-declined-in-past-decade.html

      2010 it was 11.4%, and in 2020 it’s now 9.7%. So either more houses that were vacant are no longer vacant… or the market has added more houses to the market overall that are not vacant to effectively scale the 11.4 down to 9.7%.

      But there’s a whole lot of caveats on how those numbers are generated as well…

      Housing units are classified as vacant if no one was living in them on Census Day (April 1) — unless the occupants are absent only temporarily, such as away on vacation, in the hospital for a short stay, or on a business trip.
      They are also classified as vacant if they are temporarily occupied entirely by individuals who have a usual residence elsewhere at the time of enumeration such as beach houses rented to vacationers who have a usual residence elsewhere.

      So any “shared” housing such as timeshares… or second homes are all considered “vacant” even if they aren’t and have people live in them for particular times of the year.

      Now you can make the claim that people with multiple houses are monsters… fine, but that’s a completely different thing than “9% of all houses are vacant”. I would also wonder how many houses are “vacant” because they’re literally unlivable. If you check the link the highest rates were states like Maine/Vermont/Alaska where no heat is literally a death sentence… but otherwise those houses would be unrentable.