The Berkeley Property Owners Association's fall mixer is called "Celebrating the End of the Eviction Moratorium."

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.

  • archomrade [he/him]English
    1·
    9 months ago

    I think it’s important to point out that in this conversation, i’m taking “economic rent” as Adam Smith’s concept of “rent”. Modern economists amended this term to “economic rent” due to exactly this confusion you’re having, but basically “economic rent” is exactly that amount more than what it costs to produce/maintain a product. Conceptually, rent is an issue for Smith because it’s “unproductive”, basically it cannot be accounted for what it costs to bring a commodity to market. Another example of economic rent would include owning a marketplace others are dependent on (i.e. Amazon), or a private party owning an important passage for travel, and exploiting that ownership for financial gain. You could point out that this is also the case in “profit” (Adam Smith says the price of a good is related to wages + costs + profit), but the other thing that makes “rent” pernicious for smith is that the thing owned is commonly necessary for life/movement/production and not-reproducable. He was writing at a time when “rent” was what a “lord” extracted in exchange for allowing a serf to use their land, but housing operates on the same principle (housing is built on land and land is limited ((typically “land” is the thing that’s owned with the house on top of it, but condos are another recently invented concept that makes it even muddier))). A lord is generally a person that owns many many thousands of acres in an area, and serfs living in the area had to agree to pay rent to work on it simply because there was no other option.

    So what I take issue with specifically is the profit extracted from rent, or that portion of rent that is beyond what it takes to produce or maintain a property. You rightly call this “exploitation”. Of course, the underlying issue is how that price is justified on the notion of ownership specifically: the person can charge whatever they want simply because they own it, others need it, and there’s no reasonable alternative in the same area. We could propose rules against charging more than what it costs (rent control), but that doesn’t exclude the owner from finding some other way to exploit that relationship for personal gain (i’d argue ABNB is another perfect example of an owner exploiting this ownership).

    Why should we defend their right to own a property that someone else depends on to live in? I personally find that to be more obtuse than taking issue with landlords.