Sonoma County just passed a major tenant protection ordinance that applies throughout the unincorporated areas of our county. Petaluma was the first municipality in the county to pass its own ordinance. These efforts augment the state’s recent landmark legislation called the Tenant Protection Act, codified in Civil Code 1946.2 and 1947.12 (often referred to as AB 1482) which requires just causes for termination for certain tenants.
Just cause protections require landlords to have a legally-valid reason prior to terminating a tenant. For many, this is common sense–rarely do property managers or landlord proceed to eviction without a reason. But Legal Aid’s data shows that over 30% of the evictions in Sonoma County occur for a reason other than the fault of the tenant, including evictions for no reason at all. These “arbitrary” evictions are essentially impossible to overcome in court. The landlord has an absolute right to take housing away from tenants without any cause, unless the state or local government demands otherwise. Additionally, many jurisdictions impose conditions on a landlord’s otherwise-unmitigated right to “withdraw from the rental market” (i.e. go out of business as a rental housing provider). Ellis Act implementation ensures that when landlords withdraw their properties, they are not able to immediately re-rent them for a higher price or select new tenants that they favor more after displacing the prior household.
Given the costs associated with eviction–costs that have immense impacts on the evicted families, the local communities, and the workforce–it seems crucial that, at a minimum, landlords must have a reason to remove the tenants and to follow through on plans to go out of business. The state’s Tenant Protection Act encourages local jurisdictions to pass ordinances that augment its baseline protections. The City of Sonoma could do so.
Moreover, current ordinances leave large gaps that mean that many, if not most, tenants in Sonoma County still lack meaningful just cause protections. For example, any ordinance exempting single-family homes will fail to reach the majority of tenants in almost every jurisdiction (given the relative dearth of multifamily housing).
Sonoma may be a good jurisdiction to finally pilot a protection ordinance that protects the majority of its tenant residents. Legal Aid of Sonoma County estimates that approximately 13 households and 30 individuals in Sonoma Valley every year are evicted without any stated cause. With just cause and Ellis Act protections, we can reduce or eliminate these numbers, keeping dozens of families in Sonoma Valley housed over the next several years.
(Rational for estimate: Legal Aid assisted on 15% of the total unlawful detainer cases filed for Sonoma Valley zip codes, comparing court records with internal Legal Aid data. Assuming that the relative number of 60-day “no cause” or Ellis Act eviction notices that receive services at Legal Aid is constant with the ratio of unlawful detainer defendants who come to Legal Aid, each year Just Cause and Ellis reforms would help approximately 33 households containing 77 individuals (2.34 residents per renter household in Sonoma County per US Census). But because tenants often do not seek legal services prior to a lawsuit being filed, the number is likely greater than the estimate provided.)