Contra Costa County’s moratorium on evictions directly caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has been extended from May 31 until July 15, and starting soon will no longer allow businesses over certain employee and gross-receipt thresholds to defer rent payments.
The revised ordinance, approved by a 5-0 vote, narrows the definition of “commercial real property” to property where small businesses, manufacturers or non-profit organizations operate. Such businesses must be independently owned, have 100 or fewer employees and have average annual gross receipts of no more than $15 million over the previous three years.
Chief Assistant County Counsel Mary Ann Mason said the changes are modeled on the city of Oakland’s eviction moratorium ordinance.
Supervisors said this change was made to give relief to landlords who themselves may be small businesses who are not getting rent from tenants who, in some cases, have deeper financial pockets than they do.
The supervisors heard Tuesday from one such landlord, Steve Cortese of Lafayette-based Cortese Investment Co. He said several of his tenants of his company’s properties around Contra Costa County are larger and stronger financially than his own company, and that they qualify to not pay rent based on COVID-19-related financial hardships.
“The county has made themselves arbiters of who has the better financial resources during the crisis,” Cortese told the supervisors.
The original urgency ordinance said owners “of residential property or commercial property,” without specifying the size of those owners, cannot evict tenants if the tenant can prove the failure to pay rent is directly related to loss of income or out-of-pocket medical expenses associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Those larger commercial tenants will have until the end of July to pay that rent; small-business and residential tenants will have 120 days after the shelter-in-place order is lifted to make good on rent payments.
At past meetings, and again Tuesday, supervisors have acknowledged that many property owners in Contra Costa County are under the same financial pressures as are their tenants.
Just the same, several renters and advocacy group representatives implored the supervisors Tuesday to extend the moratorium because the job market hasn’t yet improved, and will only get better incrementally.
Chief Assistant County Counsel Mary Ann Mason said the changes are modeled on the city of Oakland’s eviction moratorium ordinance.
Here’s a concept.
Come up with something that works for Contra Costa County instead of doing a copy and paste from Berekely.
COCOCO should have a lot more opened up but these simple-minded employees can do is mimic surrounding counties.
Then the Sups rubber stamp the copied documents.
There is no one on the Board of Supes who should be there in the first place.
Vote them all out.
State of California picking winners and losers. What happened to equality, as in equal protection under the law? Not the fluffy watered down version..to think there are landlords that have huge mortgages on their buildings and the state says they cannot collet rent is insane. This is not equal protection.
A while back someone mentioned the constitutional legality of this government interference with private contracts. There is all sorts of constitutionally interesting stuff going on as a result of this virus. There’s an overview at https://today.law.harvard.edu/roundup/uncharted-territory-legal-experts-weigh-in-on-the-covid-19-outbreak/
Contra costa has always considered themselves an extension of Alameda/San Francisco. For those that have been asleep for the last 20 years it’s time to decide what’s important to you for your community. I personally don’t want to be a part of the Marxist/communist experiment and will vote against anyone who is allied with that movement. We need strong constitutionalists. So whoever is running for anything in coco county, they better be ready to answer the question “what will you do to protect the constitutional rights of the people of this county, city?” They could start with allowing us to celebrate our independence on July 4th
So publicly unaccountable staff copied from of all places Oakland ? An when what they’re doing doesn’t work, will county end up being sued and have to pay out a large settlement ?
Is unfortunate so many voters, repeatedly, look no farther than the capital D after a candidate’s name in this state.
At one time, my husband and I discussed buying some rental property with the plan for retirement income. I looked around then at what different cities were doing with their rules and regulations on rental property, and nixed the idea.
Making it harder to collect rent and evict non-paying or destructive tenants for rental property owners who are not wealthy just means shrinking the supply of housing. The owner still has to cover the taxes, mortgage and upkeep of the property with no revenue if rent payments are suspended. Who would want to own rental property? Not me.
Be heard – email the supervisors. Here are their email addresses:
john_gioia@bos.cccounty.us
supervisorandersen@bos.cccounty.us
supervisor_burgis@bos.cccounty.us
SupervisorMitchoff@bos.cccounty.us
district5@bos.cccounty.us (Glover)
Awesome. “Modeled on the city of oakland”. That statement should strike fear in the hearts of any law abiding, hard-working citizen. Perhaps we should let the criminals take over houses left vacant for more than 12 hours and with the full support of the idiot mayor.
Will the BOS be on the hook to make property owners whole if renters don’t pay back rent? Seems like one more government “take” which is going to end up in the courts. Oh, and will the BOS allow property owners skip paying property taxes for a few years?
I have a family member who has a rental property. The family member charges just enough to cover the expenses of the rental house. If the renters stopped paying the property owner would be in a huge financial bind. We sent a letter BOS member Federal Glover asking what assistance rental property owners will receive from the country if renters don’t pay. We got no response. We resent the letter and again got no response. We never even got an acknowledgement. The BOS don’t care about property owners.
Did they talk about rent increase????!! I hope they don’t increase it for a few months
Here is the sad part: There are people in the Bay Area who being stock market averse decided to buy a second property to rent out instead. The idea was to get the rental property paid off by retirement, and that would generate retirement income. Now they have a risk they did not anticipate, and a local government that won’t back them up.
Not every income property owner is a big bad corporation. Further, thwarting income property owners will make the alleged housing shortage worse.
Local Government wants to play Robin Hood, however they won’t always be stealing from the rich.
Maybe, just maybe, real estate isn’t the gold standard get rich quick investment you’ve been shilled all these years.
Maybe, just maybe, not treating it as such would eliminate the false scarcity, reduce prices, and allow the people actually using the property to own it.
Or hang the landlords, class war now, whatevs.
Unfortunately, laws are “one size fits all” propositions and doesn’t account for the myriad of differences in each individual situation. As a rental owner, I’ve done two things that seem to work: 1. defer a good portion of the payment until a later date and 2. reduce the monthly rent until this all blows over. That, to me, seems fair to both me and the renter. But that’s what works in my situation. Not every tenant is suffering financially as many still have jobs and every owner has varying degrees of flexibility they can work with as it depends on their financial situation as well.