Why Are California Policymakers Taking Steps to Make the Homeless Problem Worse?

California has the largest homeless population in the United States, as well as the highest homelessness rate of any state. In a 2023 poll, more than one of every five Californains said they consider homelessness the most urgent issue facing the state—and more than eight in 10 called it a “very serious problem.” Gov. Gavin Newsom calls homelessness “a real emergency” and a “national crisis.” 

So why are policymakers in California taking actions that appear certain to make the homelessness crisis worse? 

Since June of 2022, the state as well as its cities and counties have been ending protections for renters that they put in place during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. One of those protections was a moratorium on evictions. Under an executive order issued by Newsom followed by legislation that put the statewide ban into effect, landlords were prevented from evicting tenants who suffered financial hardship due to the effects of the pandemic.

What Were the Renter Protections During COVID?

A nationwide eviction moratorium went into place under the Trump administration at the start of the pandemic. When Pres. Joe Biden extended the moratorium in 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court struck it down.

California’s statewide eviction ban, along with other renter protections, ended in June 2022, but a number of counties and cities passed their own measures to extend the moratorium. Those extensions have now expired. Oakland’s moratorium ended June 18. In Los Angeles County, evictions were allowed starting April 1. And in August, Los Angeles County renters faced a new deadline. On August 1, they were required to pay any outstanding rent they missed in the first phase of the pandemic, March 1, 2020 to Sept. 30, 2021.

“I am very worried about the deadline,” first-year Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass told the news site LAist. “I'm concerned that we're going to have another spike in homelessness.”

Bass's worries appear well-founded. As of the final week of June, 2023, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority reported a nine-percent rise in homelessness over the previous year, a period encompassing the three months since the county’s eviction ban expired. The rules allowed landlords to file eviction lawsuits, but provided new, stronger defenses for tenants at the other end of those suits.

The expiration of eviction bans has left a confusing situation for tenants, with cities and counties offering a variety of protections that can differ widely between counties and between cities. 

The Pandemic is Over. Shouldn’t Eviction Bans End Too?

If the only objective of eviction bans and other tenant protections was to provide economic relief during the height of the pandemic, it made sense to end them once the pandemic subsides. But if homelessness is a public policy priority—as it appears to be in California which spent $17.5 billion on the problem from 2018 to 2022—keeping those protections in place, according to the data collected by researchers, is an effective way to do it. And ending them can only make the problem worse.

The Economic Roundtable data shows the benefit of eviction bans and other protections in the effort to slow the spread of homelessness—which would also indicate that ending those protections will make the homeless problem worse. 

According to the Public Policy Institute of California, evictions statewide fell to only about 30 percent of their pre-pandemic levels with the protections in place. The state’s eviction ban, combined with direct cash payments to individuals (generally known as “stimulus payments”), slowed the growth of the homeless population by 41 percent in California, according to a Dec. 2022 report by the Economic Roundtable. 

In Los Angeles County, the Economic Roundtable had previously projected a 23 percent spike in homelessness from 2020 to 2022. Instead the county saw a 13 percent increase, a slowdown that the independent research group said was directly attributable to the eviction moratorium and cash payments.

The Economic Roundtable data shows the benefit of eviction bans and other protections in the effort to slow the spread of homelessness—which would also indicate that ending those protections will make the homeless problem worse. 

“Housing and income interventions during the COVID recession and the ensuing wave of unemployment reduced the growth of homelessness by almost half and can provide the same protection in future recessions,” the Economic Roundtable wrote in its report. 

National numbers from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) show the same thing. With renter protections in place across the country between October 2020 and September 2021, the number of people sheltered homelessness dropped 17 percent. Among young people living on their own, the number went down 24 percent. The number of families seeking shelter for the first time—that is, newly homeless families—was down almost 20 percent.

Landlords (Mostly) Oppose New Safeguards for Renters

In February of 2023, State Sen. María Elena Durazo (D-Los Angeles) introduced a new bill, SB 567, titled the Homelessness Prevention Act. The bill, which passed the senate on May 31 and has passed through two committees in the assembly, is drawing fire from landlords. 

While the bill does not include an eviction ban, it does attempt to make it more difficult for landlords to use “no-fault evictions,” that is, evictions not based on anything a tenant allegedly did wrong, but can happen simply because a landlord wants to take back possession of a property.

“I am more than cognizant of the difficulties presented to real estate professionals and how the pandemic has exacerbated them. But I am able to make plenty of profit and live a very comfortable life without harming the families that rent in my buildings.”

GINGER HITZKE, SAN DIEGO LANDLORD

The bill also lowers the cap on permissible annual rent hikes. Federal data from 2020 has shown that an increase of just $100 in a region’s median rent leads to a nine percent spike in the homeless population.

But in an op-ed for the Orange County Register, California Rental Housing Association President Earle Vaughn called the bill “unreasonable” and that it “fails to consider unique circumstances faced by small-scale housing providers who have dedicated their lives to housing Californians.”

But at least one landlord, Ginger Hitzke of San Diego, believes that landlords can play an important part in, not causing homelessness but preventing it, as she wrote in a commentary for CalMatters.

“Face-to-face with the downsides of active investments, some of my fellow landlords and real estate owners are skirting their responsibility—which is inherent with that investment—by simply displacing tenants with evictions or rent hikes,” she wrote. “I am more than cognizant of the difficulties presented to real estate professionals and how the pandemic has exacerbated them. But I am able to make plenty of profit and live a very comfortable life without harming the families that rent in my buildings.”