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.


  • @Croquette
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    69 months ago

    Which risk? Any increase in taxes, mortgage rates and renovations are directly passed on the tenants.

    At the end of the day, someone else if paying your mortgage because you could enter the market before they could.

    And nowadays, simply having someone paying your mortgage isn’t enough. Landlords need to be cashflow positive.

    • ∟⊔⊤∦∣≶
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      -29 months ago

      What the hell are you talking about??

      You think you can just renovate the bathroom and bill the tenant for the work?? That’s not how reality works.

      Rent can also only be increased once per year and the tenant is able to appeal to the Tribunal if it is too much and the Tribunal can order the rent to decrease.

      In terms of risk: When building: unforeseen expenses like complex earthworks, no access to building supplies and environmental issues that can blow out construction times by months or even years (this actually happened recently with gib), and all the while having to pay the mortgage when there isn’t a house to live in.

      When renting: property damage from tenants, meth labs (it will be illegal to rent a property soon with a certain level of meth contamination), things requiring repairs in the house (I recently had to buy a new heat pump because the old one died), changes to laws like the recent one that requires older homes be retrofitted with insulation at cost to the owner, tenants moving out leaving you with the mortgage to cover yourself, job loss myself leaving me with no way to cover the extra…

      And nowadays, simply having someone paying your mortgage isn’t enough. Landlords need to be cashflow positive.

      I showed earlier that mortgage payments are more than double rent payments.