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.
Concerts fundamentally have a limit or capacity. There is no such thing for housing. All current restraints are arbitrarily chosen and we can change them if we want to.
At the root, housing in the US and especially California is a tragedy of the commons where it is in no current owners interests to allow more construction. So all of them have created a homeowners lobby to make new construction illegal.
So you're saying housing has a fundamental limit?
I mean you could say the same about concerts. They have a fundamental limit because the venue refuses to build a bigger space.
No. We built our cities wrong, and artificially created a limit. If we were to admit that suburbs are nothing but an economic drain, and rezoned properly to mixed use medium to high density in the cities, and no more suburbs, or tax the suburbs properly and stop subsidizing them, we would have walkable cities with plenty of housing.
Just in Imperial Beach, we could turn these 4 sq miles from being able to support ≈26,000 people to being able to house ≈250,000 which would greatly expand the city's ability to fund badly needed infrastructure. Doing this nationwide would cause a housing crash, and cost many rich people money.
You could say the same about a given venue for a concert, however. The city is the venue for housing
Then you don't understand the difference between a city and a building. Cities are amorphous. Buildings are concrete, sometimes literally.
We do have bigger venues. But no matter how large the venue, the concert has to be in a venue which has a capacity limit.
No such thing exists for housing.