One is spending all her money on a messy divorce. One was shot in the foot and couldn’t collect his disability check. More than one lost a job to the pandemic.
Eviction court was filled last week with those who could not pay their rent. Spread out on benches under fluorescent lamps on the second floor of an Alameda County courthouse in Hayward, they were waiting to learn whether they will be forced from their homes at the end of the month.
The renters are caught up in a wave of evictions that has swept the court system following the end of pandemic-era moratoriums, which had prevented landlords from kicking out tenants who failed to pay.
To the great relief of landlords who were themselves behind on mortgages and payments, Alameda County’s eviction moratorium expired at the end of April, with Oakland’s following in July and Berkeley’s in August. Alameda was the last county with a pandemic moratorium still in place — and other Bay Area counties also saw evictions spike as the state’s protections wound down starting in 2021.
As local protections expire, tenants are left reeling. Last week was the busiest in Alameda County eviction court history. The distinction isn’t likely to last long: The past three weeks have each set a record for the number of eviction cases on the court’s docket. In 2019, there were 3,477 eviction cases — in the five months since May, Alameda County has already tallied 2,953 cases.
“It’s impossible to give every low-income litigant true access to justice under these circumstances,” said Anne Tamiko Omura, executive director of the Eviction Defense Center in Oakland. “Moving forward, we are going to see mass evictions.”
I. Struggling to catch up
In 2019, Yvette Rubio and her then-husband moved into a two-bedroom duplex in Union City with their four kids. She had struggled with rent payments before — often falling behind, but always catching up. During the pandemic, though, she lost her job as a housecleaner. By July 2022, she stopped paying rent altogether.
During that time, Rubio also stopped maintaining the property, her landlord, Armando Hurtado, alleged, with heaps of trash accumulating on the sidewalks. “We got a letter from the city saying that the house was a hazard because there was so much trash around it,” he said. “It’s been a complete nightmare.”
He filed for eviction, but ran up against the moratorium. He tried again this year, with hopes of reclaiming the nearly $14,500 that Rubio owes since the moratorium ended. In total, she owes him over $35,000 for 14 months of unpaid rent.
“If I could pay on everything I owe, I would — I don’t want to leave,” said Rubio, who clutched her purse as she spoke. “I want to stay, but I can’t, because I don’t have money. I just barely get by day by day.”
Meanwhile, those 14 months of lost rent are 14 months where Hurtado and his family have had to cut back on their own spending to cover the cost of the rental, one of three they own.
“We saved for a rainy day, but you don’t expect to be saving for a rainy year and a half,” Hurtado said.
In shielding renters who could not pay, the moratorium left landlords to provide free housing, even as their own mortgages came due. Across Alameda County, property owners are owed nearly $1 billion in rent, according to data from the East Bay Rental Housing Association. Nearly 15% of property owners were at a risk of foreclosure.
“Property owners all across Alameda County were subsidizing rent for for people that couldn’t pay,” said Chris Tipton, a spokesperson for the association. “Restaurants weren’t having to give away free food, gas stations weren’t giving out free gasoline — no other business or industry was asked to do that.”
Advocates say the alternative — allowing evictions — would have put masses of vulnerable people on the streets in the middle of a pandemic.
The state created a $5.2 billion fund for rental assistance, but there wasn’t nearly enough to go around and relief was slow to arrive.
Rent unpaid during the pandemic is now money that landlords don’t expect to get, Tipton said. Property owners filing for eviction can only seek money owed since the end of the moratorium. Any other back rent must be reclaimed in small claims court.
“Do you want to keep hanging on and fighting a battle that seems pointless, and going to court, paying more money, trying to figure it out, with the hopes you’ll see some of it back?” Hurtado said. “Or do you just cut the ties and move on with your life?”
II. In limbo
In October 2022, Kelsey Hartman, a teacher with the Pleasanton school district, came across a post on Craigslist of a young woman looking for housing. Wanting to help, she offered to rent Mikaela Reyes a spare room in her Hayward home.
Reyes and Hartman proved to be incompatible roommates. In February, Hartman asked Reyes to leave. She refused, claiming she didn’t have the money. Hartman waived January and February’s rent, encouraging Reyes to put the money toward moving expenses, but warned that if she wasn’t out by the end of March, she would need to pay going forward.
In May 2023, with Reyes still not paying, Hartman filed to evict her. But Alameda County’s moratorium cast a wide net in the tenant protections it offered — even though Reyes had moved in after the start of the moratorium, and her inability to pay was unrelated to COVID, Hartman could not evict her for money owed before May. So she continued to live with Reyes, each night retreating straight to her room, putting in ear plugs, and locking the door.
On Wednesday, Reyes — her dark hair up pulled back in a ponytail, a mask pulled up over her chin — came ready to fight. “I’m not willing to let this lady move even an inch,” she said.
On the other side of the corridor, Hartman had less of a fighting spirit. She began to tear up behind her glasses, pushing her short grey hair behind her ears as she described the past year of living with Reyes.
“I opened my home up, wanting to help Mikaela,” she said. “Now I don’t feel like it’s home.”
At court Wednesday, the two reached a settlement: Hartman waived her right to collect past-due rent so long as Reyes leaves by the end of November. But at the end of the day, the two returned to the same house to sleep under the same roof for yet another month.
III. A strained system
Last year, after months of moving from hotel to hotel, Shamar Bridges and his girlfriend signed a lease for a one-bedroom apartment in Fremont. A few months in, Bridges’ girlfriend moved out suddenly, leaving him on the hook for the rent. He didn’t pay and claims that he tried to settle up with his property manager.
On Wednesday, the lanky 22-year-old shuffled across the courthouse halls in bright Nike basketball shoes, alone. Like many of the renters that day, Bridges came without a lawyer. He relied on help from one of the many nonprofits there meant to advocate for low-income tenants. Nationally, 90% of landlords come to court with representation, whereas only 10% of tenants do. Tenants with lawyers tend to negotiate better settlements, owing less in back rent.
But the system is strained. At the Eviction Defense Center in Oakland, where Omura serves as executive director, staff have been putting in 11-hour days. For the first time in over 25 years, her office is turning people away.
“We’ve always prided ourselves on always stretching to meet the demand, but the demand is just too high right now,” Omura said. “It’s way more than we can handle.”
Judge Victoria Kolakowski, who oversees eviction court in Alameda County, is tasked with finding the balance between tenant rights and a property owners’ right to a timely trial.
“The theory behind all this is that the cases move quickly, but they have to be perfect,” Kolakowski said.
In her office, a thick binder contains all the rental ordinances that apply to Alameda County and its cities. She and her staff are considering opening another department to handle the “tsunami” of cases before them.
“We’ve gone through a period where almost nobody could be evicted for over three years,” she said. “The attorneys are all overworked and their clients are all understandably concerned.”
Most cases do not go to trial — rather, they end up settling, with the client agreeing to move out by a certain date, with the landlord offering a waiver of some of the back rent.
The goal, Omura said, is to find tenants a “soft landing.”
“The problem is, in Alameda County with the housing shortage, there really is no soft landing,” she said. “Even if you’re able to get a debt forgiven for a tenant and give them a few weeks to move out, the reality is that the majority of them aren’t going to find any place to live.”
Rubio, the Union City tenant, has been looking for trailers on Craigslist — her pastor might let them park at the church for free.
In Hayward, despite the settlement agreement, Hartman suspects that Reyes may try to stay past November.
In Fremont, Bridges is considering moving in with friends, or back into a hotel.
The judge is aware of the gravity of the decisions made in her courtroom.
“Probably, some of them are going to wind up homeless. And I hate it. I think all of us do,” Kolakowski said. “When you tell somebody, ‘You have to leave,’ it’s like: ‘To go where?’”
Ethan Varian contributed to this report.