After a long and somewhat fraught public process, the Alameda County Board of Supervisors this week finally approved a new ordinance to protect renters from unscrupulous evictions.
The idea for the “just cause eviction” ordinance was first floated in 2018 but was stalled at various times by disagreements over how far it should go, pandemic-related scheduling hiccups and repeated tinkering by supervisors.
“It’s been a tortured journey to get to this point,” Supervisor Nate Miley said.
The ordinance is based on the state’s just cause law but is designed to provide slightly more protection for renters in the county’s unincorporated areas.
While both the county and state allow renters to be evicted for “no fault” of their own, meaning they’ve done nothing wrong to warrant eviction, the county’s new rules spell out greater restrictions on landlords in such cases.
For example, where the state requires landlords to pay one month’s rent to tenants in “no fault” evictions, the county requires two.
Also, where the state requires 60-day eviction notices, the county now requires 90-day notices if someone in the household is younger than 18, disabled, elderly or lower income.
The county’s ordinance also applies to single-family homes if the landlord owns five or more such properties in the unincorporated areas.
In addition, landlords are forbidden from retaliating against tenants for reporting housing violations to the county.
Housing advocates ‘not happy’
While the protections go beyond what the state requires, housing advocates have complained throughout the process that almost every time the board took up the issue in the past, supervisors weakened the ordinance’s provisions.
“I’m not happy with this ordinance. I’m going to support it but it’s nowhere near what we initially discussed when I joined this board,” said Supervisor Elisa Marquez, noting that tenants’ groups have made many compromises and the landlords “have barely made any.”
“The fact that it took so long to get to this decision is unacceptable,” Marquez said. “It should not take this long to make a policy decision.”
She said the ordinance is a step in the right direction but “it’s barely scratching the surface” of what the county could have done to protect people from wrongful evictions.
“Many good housing providers, honest housing providers, fair housing providers, many of them, and they’re experiencing the protections, the ordinances, they’re having to bear the burden of these protections even if they’re not a bad actor.”
Supervisor David Haubert
Supervisor Nikki Fortunato Bas, who was just sworn in this year so missed the bulk of the just cause debate, said she’d welcome additional tenant protections in the future.
While Marquez and tenant advocates would like to have seen a stronger ordinance, Supervisor David Haubert said the new rules had to be balanced with “the property rights needs of people who have invested their life savings.”
“Many good housing providers, honest housing providers, fair housing providers, many of them, and they’re experiencing the protections, the ordinances, they’re having to bear the burden of these protections even if they’re not a bad actor,” Haubert said.
He also said some people will never believe the county has done enough to protect tenant rights regardless of what the supervisors enact.
“We have to recognize we’ve been at it for years, we’re at this point, I’m not excited about revisiting any of this for a long time,” he said.
Miley said part of the reason for the delay was that it took a while to craft the original ordinance with help from the San Francisco Foundation and then the pandemic-era eviction moratorium curtailed the need for additional tenant protections during its roughly three-year duration.
“I’m for tenants. I’m for small landlords,” Miley said. “I will not do anything that will harm either side. That’s why it’s a real clever balancing act that we have to enact.”
Lindsay Haddix, director of East Bay Housing Organizations, which worked closely with local tenant group My Eden Voice to help craft the ordinance, said she’s happy supervisors voted to increase tenant protections.
“I think it’s a great signal to the community that tenants and families living in the unincorporated county will have this extra protection and the benefits will spill out to the larger community,” Haddix said. “That doesn’t mean we wouldn’t like to see additional steps taken, but that shouldn’t detract from the fact that we got to this step of this being passed.”
The new ordinance, which goes into effect on March 6 and the Community Development Agency is required to report back to the board on its implementation in February of 2026.
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