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]@midwest.social
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    1 year ago

    The tenant can’t afford to because rent seekers reduce the available supply of housing. If they can afford to pay you rent then they can afford to pay a mortgage, and the profit you derive from that relationship is representative of what they could be saving for a down payment if you weren’t leaching off of them.

    You are part of the problem.

    • ∟⊔⊤∦∣≶@lemmy.nz
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      1 year ago

      Wrong again sonny.

      The average house price is now over 1 million. If you buy a house for 1 mil with a $200k deposit (unreachable for the vast majority including me) then your weekly payments are over $1200 excluding rates.

      To rent a property it is very easy to find a multitude that sit at the $600 per week mark and some even lower for the same number of bedrooms.

      So “If they can afford to pay you rent then they can afford to pay a mortgage” is stupid. Mortgage is literally double the cost of rent.

      • archomrade [he/him]@midwest.social
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        1 year ago

        The average house price is now over 1 million

        To rent a property it is very easy to find a multitude that sit at the $600 per week mark and some even lower for the same number of bedrooms.

        Lol this is completely meaningless:

        • “average” home price is going to be far higher than “average” rental price, because the price distribution of houses doesn’t match the price distribution of rentals (a $500 mil home isn’t going to have a matching rental property)
        • a home and an apartment are priced differently, so “$600 per week … for same number of bedrooms” could mean anything, including a $5mil 4 bedroom home vs a 4 bedroom apartment in a 50 unit building.

        Suffice it to say: I don’t fucking believe you. Even in NZ, straight comparisons between mortgage servicing costs of a house and rental pricing of the same house would show weekly rent is more expensive than the weekly mortgage servicing costs. There’s good reason for that, too: in a market where the home is worth more than what can be extracted in rent, you would definitionally make more money selling the property than renting it out (and nobody would be doing it)

        Edit: The only exception to this would be if you purchased the house at the peak of a housing bubble, and are now renting the house out after the bubble has popped and so you are unable to sell without taking a loss.

        • ∟⊔⊤∦∣≶@lemmy.nz
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          1 year ago

          You don’t have to believe me, the facts are right here:

          https://lemmy.nz/comment/2449229

          straight comparisons between mortgage servicing costs of a house and rental pricing of the same house would show weekly rent is more expensive than the weekly mortgage servicing costs

          You are wrong as my real world examples show.